Variations On A Large Historical Oversight:
There isn’t a ladder, but there is a picture
of your new husband in an airplane bathroom
holding a jewelers’ saw against his
exposed stomach, trying to cut out the
cancer. I don’t know how you got the
hydrogen peroxide bottle past the hands
of so many calm Hispanic janitors, or why
you held the camera with the knocked
rake of your shaved knees, but from what
the photograph shows there was turbulent
fever and the stewardess had given
everyone Plan B pills and shots of
Robitussin in case the procedure called
for a water landing. The perched laminate
floor you both appear to be standing on is covered
in unwrapped sanitary napkins and looks,
from some angles, like a rotisserie city built
wide into bone—a city in the mouth of a three-
legged cat, a cat fully held in an engine not
stalled. Your new husband is
saying something about the limited role of female
political correspondents during nationally televised
catastrophe fundraisers but you are holding
your own saw, carving at your own chest, removing
from yourself something you never really
wanted. We talk about this picture years later: you in
a bus checking children for lice; me in a botany
exhibit on blight. You say, where there isn’t
this loss I am lost in performance. I can’t eat
celery I say. We watch a boy swim in a flooded
station wagon. When he comes up for air we are
all in a meat locker.
Confounding Attempts To Explain The Mystery:
On a folded piece of
dead-red paper I
have written the
words this tiger is not
drunk enough to
kill us. I place
the piece of paper on
the lip of my used coffee
table, but you still
don't want to pet the
animal, and I still don't
want not to ask
you to. There's something about
the danger, you say, so
I pull out the
cigarettes and
gasoline and soon
the whole apartment is
burnt fur and ROTC
cadets all-hugging a
contaminated fire hose. I like how
your hair looks in
the loose mist of
that cold water, smoke
seizing with the shake of
what it means to hold
nothing. We don't know
if the tiger made it out or
where he will show up
next. When we get you
home, the man in
your bed suggests there
will always be the weight of
possibility possibly boxed
in what we never want
to open. You look back at
me, and I look down at
the blood now appearing
at the side of my right
ankle. What is inside me? I
ask. What is inside me, you
respond.
