Emma Hawes
The Wake

Lying on your stomach, the weight of your back presses down
threatens to sink through the other parts and reemerge
a stalk of corn resting under the bed,
your backbone getting up and walking out,
leaving you immobile in your room.
There you are as nighttime voices of half-drunk half men
rough and howling crowned with baseball caps
coteries of girls with pointy toes and cars whose door locks
beep and pulse, the air molecules trying to dance
more tunefully but bullied out of it.
You realize your once limited eyeballs
can now see through the back of your head,
and you are looking at the withered echeveria succulent plants,
her pink buds cycling through the color wheel to become the
dead mauve of the snailshells
your brother cracked open still on the snail.
Haven't you watered her?
Times goes by and you can tell it because the light leaves a pattern
across the room, more than twice, more than a hundred times,
and then the trickle of the radioator torments you though
it was summer when first you lay down.
The time is oppresive and on top of you,
layers and layers, blankets on a sickbed fever
a rapist in a white shirt, drying kelp underwater, desolate.
An itch, a yellow starburst itch pricking your left buttock,
but of course you can't get to it, and of how helpful
a fly lands there and all the eight thousand hairs
on every one of his feet scratches your itch,
scratches and scratches and digs in, tills up your flesh.
Slowly you become deflated, sopping and pale,
a used condom all white hatred, and there are maggots.

It's almost a good feeling, to be home to someone
when for so long you had been alone.
Eventually they find you and you don't care,
wonder what there was left of you to bury,
but they did, and the field runs down into a farm
where you can see your spine has taken root,
and it waves to you merrily, glad it got out of that mess
while it still had the chance.

There is screaming, and beating your head,
a shrew with red eyes.
you roll over and the last great adventure hasn't come yet,
but it's twenty after eight so you are late for work again,
and sleeping alone, and no one can really console you about that.

<< Back to Issue 6, 2004