Luisa Giugliano, p.1
from BASIC CITY CROWD
V.
I welcomed the doctors into my hotel room.
Doctors, come in. Welcome to our archives, numb your heads and shave
your fingers.
We have done the research on time travel and have failed.
We are sorry, individually so.
Have we built the barn yet and are we operating on each other, are we
one of them, have we had our bones elongated?
Each with our stables and barns, each with out roads and posts from which
we could see everything.
I was alone, but they accepted the we.
I was a widow living off your pension.
Pastoral executions, days, months, years.
Mass grave people throwing themselves in to erase their trace. Those
who are loved are pushed.
The vellum pages of the family bible, the balsa of the book boxes.
I am blind, having been born without eyes and nerve clusters
having been kidnapped from the filing cabinet cradle, the dusty
record jacket as blanket, the butter.
Never honest with my days as a child, never sure where the deep end
was or how to find “float” in the card catalog.
V.
I welcomed the doctors into my hotel room.
Doctors, come in. Welcome to our archives, numb your heads and shave
your fingers.
We have done the research on time travel and have failed.
We are sorry, individually so.
Have we built the barn yet and are we operating on each other, are we
one of them, have we had our bones elongated?
Each with our stables and barns, each with out roads and posts from which
we could see everything.
I was alone, but they accepted the we.
I was a widow living off your pension.
Pastoral executions, days, months, years.
Mass grave people throwing themselves in to erase their trace. Those
who are loved are pushed.
The vellum pages of the family bible, the balsa of the book boxes.
I am blind, having been born without eyes and nerve clusters
having been kidnapped from the filing cabinet cradle, the dusty
record jacket as blanket, the butter.
Never honest with my days as a child, never sure where the deep end
was or how to find “float” in the card catalog.