sinkhole
JJ Rowan
i.
when he says to get
on the floor and you
don’t think toward force
maybe gravity
but of an intimacy which
opens your body to the
stale power of assumption
how to explain
to fuckwit
how your power might be
passed between rough palms
how
complex to form
the nasal and the vowel
(how the mechanics go here)
what is the history
of the negative
in what languages might
it also signify a positive
how a woman with
a breathy no really
fucking
wants it
in Steubenville
things are returning to normal
the families
would like to resume
a normal life
the sorry boys are being
sorry
the media is being
sorry
what it is to be sixteen
and still in existence
this is no time to be quiet
all I can muster
is quiet
I had a lot of time
on my hands after I
apologized
I just sat here
waiting &
waiting & waiting
quietly
to think
who might access a
body as it sleeps
how ugly are fingers
there is a sinkhole on Lincoln
I’d like to go see
maybe to stand in
modern offering for
a cracked-open earth
what earth wouldn’t
crack open? what could swallow me more than this?
I can’t tell the difference
now between dreaming
the dream and waking simply with
the pit of the dream
at least once daily
to check for familiar cars
weighing the value of one
more visit
to record make/model
and tags
I check Fourth sometimes also
check behind me as
I walk home for slow-moving vehicles
the one truck like his but not his
often in the lot
but in the dream there are no cars
he walks in and shoots me
at my desk or he walks in
and we walk out
we speak quietly in the lot and he shoots me
or occasionally we argue
in the lot and he shoots
himself
but not often
I wonder if any change in geography
would change
the dream / the
waking dream
in the forest
we talk about minimal distance
nothing you say in the forest can ever hurt you and
everything you say in the forest belongs to the trees so just
leave it
ii.
a sex offender registry in fossil records. how to embed a crime in marrow. an offense that involves entering an unwanted object into a space and a punishment which does the same. a ritual where the bones of the expired offenders are marked with fire. expired or otherwise. marrow that boils guilty. if marrow would sear true. a record that looses all other records. a sex offender grading scale. when you accomplish, you accomplish under offense. when you are a star, you are a star under offense. your offense burns out your star. stardust doesn’t mean magic has arrived. stardust means something has entered your body which can never unenter. your body opens, is open, to hazard. weak body. bad body. body unstable. body on scale of normal to. your anonymous body is all over the internet. the internet will know who you are. cares not to know. soon your body will be a memory embedded only in cache. soon your body in the halls with the other bodies. where you once passed the bodies that would place themselves in your body. how to dismember a body without removing anything. how human an unconscious body can or can not be. how humanity becomes anatomy becomes a cellular telephone. how lucky that information sharing can inform the holes in your evening. in your evening body. your body which can’t remember the tilt of the sky. how many can witness / how many can tell. so when we burn your bones it will be illogical. it will make us wince. we will breathe you so we can spit you out. that you dare stand up anywhere. that you dare motivate. that you forget / that you are afforded. that you should be sixteen and normal. is normal. is touching. is entering uninvited. normal is shameful. normal will invite you into its halls to be stared at in a pity way but also in the way where you are unfamiliar broken wicked / that your wickedness is contagious / that your brokenness is contagious / that your brokenness is ugly and that ugliness ought be put away
Work by JJ Rowan has previously appeared in West Wind Review, Horse Less Review, Everyday Genius and others. A chapbook, the selected jesus, is now available from Shirt Pocket Press.
