Wait

Letter after Dismemberment

-34Letter after Dismemberment Lover, I left you because you would not slip me into the squares of an ice tray, though I asked. I was considering a jar of preserved lemons and watching television, though not really, and you wondered, aloud, if anyone had died on camera, by accident, if that had been captured.Want flickered in me, and fell, as though from a great height. But it must have been earlier when it came to me: seeing the neighbor man, perhaps. Our tenement windows cut into him like grids, exposing an arm, a finger. Such mystery, the divided flesh, like a photograph spreading onto a page—the body so piecemeal. Or the closet, being punished in the dark of overcoats and shoes. I drew my knees to my body. I became a smaller box, and when your arms first wrapped around me, later, in love, what could I want to give you—to give any man— but the tightest hold? To keep you secret as a stone? Then I wanted to be the stone. I found a man, one who wanted the body in inches, who dreamed in pixel, became divisible. Have you hoped for anything enough to die? Honestly, I do not remember. Not even that first gutter of warmth when I saw the knife, not even the last, now that I am everywhere, in earth and in ash, in the stomach of the one who swallowed me.And then, when they killed him, sent him into the air in a chambered cloud, the flies that erupted from his belly, spun with blood, the grass, the goats, the milk they gave.And somewhere, I am in a girl, lightly fingering her wrists, how her hands fit around them, thumb to index, the pressure on the vein, the world encircled, trapped there, the pleasure rising, and wanting to ask for it.Then asking. -35- ...