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RIVKA CLIFTON
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.
RIVKA CLIFTON is the transfemme author of Muzzle (JackLeg Press) as well as the chapbooks MOT and Agape (from Osmanthus Press). She has work in Pleiades, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, and other magazines.
