To the Various Fathers
BY ROB ARNOLD
Often, when the weather is right, you can see across the bay
to the far shore, to where as a young man you fumbled your way into the beds of first one woman, then many,
and always that ache as your clothes came off, that regression and fear, those slowly guided fingers over scarred subdermis,
this repulsion over the flawed, once-flayed body of the year-old boy you were,
who was, who still remains, a confusion of, resemblance of, mistake of a son to the various fathers who wanted you dead,
from the first father who ravaged with abandonment,
or the second father whose hate broke over the wife and kids, who heaved you through walls and into other houses, other names,
other fathers who fumed with drink, whose anger would knot under the skin and grow each year into this waste reflected before you now,
father to none who are named, none who are breathing new life on this crust of a shore,
this slightness of being, shedding of skins, this opening vein
which is your sole fucking inheritance, so be thankful.
Chimera
BY ROB ARNOLD
Blood smear on 90 West, pulped bits of fur, white of a bone or jaw.
God’s form perfected in a blaze of tar,
pale tendrils breaking through the earth to drag it all down.
These ruthless enumerations, dead winter beaches.
This broken goose folded over itself, as though staring into its own wreckage.
And you, the grafted son, pastiche of old scars and self-hate,
paralytic ideation snaking through the brain.
How you would mime the gun against your temple, trigger the thumb,
fingers splayed like a puppeteer’s pulling slick strings
of unseeing brain matter, skull fragments,
forgotten memories and dreams glistening from out the other side.
You would do it casually, a joke, a way to punctuate a bad day.
Your dead sister not yet gone, the little tongues of despair,
masquerades of light and creation like stars being born in the throat.
Were you to actualize the bullet, conjure the partitioned skull.
Were you to allow the seconds to tick, how long the fleeting awareness?
How long the eye to quick-twitch, the aspenwork of neurons?
How long the black blood, the flickering cortex?
How long until the mind went dark?
