Theatre
If I were to draw it: structured opposition—
mind, foot, earth, firmament, what they did
to me, on the X-ray the nails long as tines.
If one were to rewrite what happened,
the first unit of signification would be
the childhood journey through the dark pines,
the final humiliation gathered from the natural world,
which is to say ankle as hymen, body as thing broken
on words. I thought, "I am falling,"
and
diagrammatically it was such. In such a story
content is inconsequential, the strawberry moon
languishing in the patriarchal night
neither here nor there, the subject dragging the object
through the empty streets. Like the first time
I fucked someone, how he rode me home
on the back of his bike, the vast sky all around us,
the fireflies fireflies.
About the Author
Mei Underhill's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary and Colorado Review.
