Insulation, and: Paralytic

Paralytic

Fall 2007

Ice smoke rose and choked the red light flare blazing through our exhaust,the old Cherokee tailpipe muttered in my driveway and you sat shotguncocked on life like we had to find someplace as deep as our roots—deep asyour mother told you in the holy-day-light that she was Jesus and graced your templewith a pan, deep as I floated dead in the womb, was delivered blueand revived on the doctor's second last try. Hotbox to hotbox, both winter nights—one before I at all and then, right then, at sixteen I came to.Idle in the driver's seat, I pressed a cigarette cherry into my calf and we laughedand drooled, expelled, in any way, stupor or relief. I palmed the window fog,watched it gather at the limp trace of my fingers—watched it well and streakand leave glances of the drifts outside, bullwhip snow flogging the too-lateschool night cold that, to us, began to melt away, wear off like Novocaine.

Paralytic

Fall 2007

I'd never seen a sky's mouth not foaming with treesjust gaping toothless    that's how I began out-wakingthe west with its cavernous dome    the weightlessof my disproportion car alarms in the parking lot out-wakingthe dorm    and far off I heard a barking farm dogthe gutter of the grain mill the occasional pickup truck out-wakingus    rapid fire tire chains spitting all that dry gravel upand the floodlight whir of the stadium next door    out-wakingthe crowd    out-waking paralytic sleep    my mutevocal cords    his soles shifting behind the door    out-wakinghow it never creaked or swung    opened the way we rememberterror in pages of a flip book    some aberrational man out-wakingwho never moved but neared nightly that yearstood over me    breathless and    still    out-waking