Notes on the State of Virginia, IV

Friday, July 15, 2016

Love carved me in stained glass

like a new tattoo. Call me a curio, one Hottentot show. Ask

how I learnt to admire the prettiest bruise. Or how a body

can be sold into anything. O what soiled words I could fit my

lips around. And, body, found object whose hole can hold

anything. If I embrace this emptiness, all puppetry is possible.

I stuffed most of myself down his snow-globe exotica, found

room for my black head on his mahogany shelf. Squeezed

between David Foster Wallace and a gilded map of the

Americas. He liked his women unspoken, the body

imperfect. To mark and remark that terrible wound. No

matter if sugar was dulled and unconscious. He preferred to

invent a person there. He ached to be inside, thought he

deserved to claim it; as if there was something here to be

reclaimed. Some mystery codified in the dark bone. As if a

self could be unowned.

Friday, July 15, 2016