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TWO Joe Bonomo |
YARD TRAUMA One, they called "fetal pig." One
gimpy leg stiffly cocked, one poor arm.... He wore a platform shoe and
glasses. The biology teacher screamed at them. That morning they drew
shaking scalpels to the soft underside of the frog. He pinned thin skin-flaps
to the table laying back its tiny dress. As taught, he sliced its stomach,
drew it open. Inside lay a half-digested cricket—a stillness greater
than that surrounding it. How abstract, the slow dissolve. This was many
years ago. __ THIS EXHALATION I knew a woman who grew up in a funeral home, knew
the moaning and wailing, the dream-like harp during family wakes while
she drew or wrote, or tried to sleep, the seep of formaldehyde like plum
or pear—air, awakening to its waxed fate, rushing from uncollapsed
cavities, the dead body sighing. Sundays in church and the bare loft,
long after the choir had left to congregate closer to the altar, whispers
sent forth too mysterious to protest as anything more than wind through
pipe, or creaks in floorboards, however this affirmation of silence, this
exhalation, came.
__ What I'm reading, June '06: D.J. Waldie's Holy Land, Alphonso Lingis' Dangerous Emotions, Nick Tosches' The King Of The Jews, and Baseball Digest. |