I know a dark box with a body inside—
I know in time
it will fill with more bodies.
In time, a hand will thud down
on a meaty clavicle. I’ve lived
years in this dark box.
And now, returned,
I only watch. The boys
*
beat their limbs and torsos against
one another’s. The strobes
intensify their jerking. For years,
I fought the urge to lie
face down and let come
whomever would come.
And now, returned, it’s evident no one
*
would come. Once a man said
come, and I did.
He led me to a corner
and made his body
a fence. First with a knee
then his hand, he
rubbed the part of me I loved
least. My friends were somewhere inside
the dark box, dancing and fighting
with each other. When I found
*
them, I was quiet.
The spaces I entered
quiet. I watched a boy
hook a boy’s neck and pull him closer,
and I was quiet
still—in these bars now I never
worry. I just sip a clear liquid
and the boys beat against each
other until the night’s thread reaches
*
the end and the metaphors
they whisper
move into their hands
or dissipate like ether
into a patient’s mouth
and the scalpel prepares its little number
and the nurses pirouette to new
age flute music. One strokes
*
my hair. She says you’re going to be
okay. How foreign
her hand feels winding through
my hair. I think about a dark box
until I am in that dark box.
Somewhere deep inside me,
I know a man
is coaxing the most femme parts out
*
of me. Somewhere else
the man who touched
me until my body turned
off is remembering when his body
too was subject
to another’s. Maybe he is dead.
Maybe, now, if I put my face
to the floor, someone would
come and show me
how to turn a labyrinth
into a line.