Violent Rooms

Caving outward.
Mummied in own skin.
Deafened by the sound of squeezing out.

When the body is just newly a body.

Is this fresh experience.

Is this oblique existence.
Not a column. Any leaf.

A trajectory.
A dead house.
A torn dress.
Into dust track.

Some facts.
A head-wrap.
A twelve-year-old woman.
A motel.

What the memory will not let.

The fragrant connection to blood.

Curse of what the hand cannot reach.
That the arm is too brief that it glimpses
its own tragedy. The forlorn body. Object.
Cannot open up throat and pull out verbs
or sound
or disturb the strange witness.
The house is gray with red doors.

Dawn Lundy Martin is studying for the PhD degree in English literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has a Master's degree in English/creative writing from San Francisco State University. Dawn is working on her first collection of poems titled Other Americas.

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