The Maynard
Fall 2018

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The Second Treatise

Evolving from strangeling to bedfellow,
two visions in parallel but still I look the other way,
and pinch the laughter out of the crooked-mouthed family photos displayed on the wall.

Some wells are only as deep as the light
that slices them into their spare parts: the basin, the body, the breach.

And this is where we begin and end and begin again.

I did not think that I would become the portrait of
the flesh’s confidante, a syringe with a faulty spring—a rocket, then—leaving a part of
myself inside a moment, in-between the couch’s claws and craned hands.
The method to this madness is just that: methodical.
Mechanical even, in how each dip of the back is met with the split of a tongue,
for a dress rehearsal with no ceremony to follow.

In a glass house, where is the emergency exit?

I could not speak in beautiful articulations when bowed down,
But even the unintelligible was given voice
        through the thick-cut sequins on pillows,
        the map to nowhere, the smell of his last dinner—the view of a city uninterrupted.

Before soaking in the bedside blues, my mind rearranges itself red.
I make a promise to remember everything about how the hospital’s neon lights sparkled
in the name of the Three Sisters—in the horizon, what a view.