Anna Fruman (p. 20, 21, 36

anna fruman 2022

there are no cannibals in london only academics with copper pots

he makes no allowance for the undertaking of going to the grocery store

a tuesday in the dairy aisle he buys two cartons of milk three of yogurt twenty grains of rice to lie across his doorstep

let me pass the checkout aisle pass scanners pass money pass faded faces staring from faded ink

home he cooks a steak he eats very little vacancies line his stomach

I considered my courses the way the wind bent around my ribbed body a warning a ceiling fan the clanging of a rail

in the months of november and december he replaces the soap the laundry basket the telephone wire the bird feeder the echoes in the living room

I prepared myself washed my brain nine times a day

lofe after lobe after lobe until my skin burgeoned red

in the months of november and december he replaces his eyes his arms his larynx his tendons with a bottle now floating in the thames

another year congratulate me on watching the laundry dry on a washing line congratulations the methodology of madness a birthday card two days early

and he stains the kitchen table with the shatters of him

he plays himself in every other dream his mind floods

a drip a pen drops a drop of water skitters across a cracked spine

darkness spreads ink to newspaper his radio in a house that never knew how it was to be tangled

to be weighted to wear to fissure in places there never were before

sometimes he wakes upside down

sometimes he never wakes at all

floating instead in the lost day the lost year of spinning fans and solitary swims on a beach where sand tangled the waves smothered him

alive the way the wind cuts into his head in the morning innocence drifts

and a curtain buries his body enrapture and enrobe rapture rapture and tell him his sins

heaven folded cold after the war tell him his sins he sits on a dusty sofa tell him his sins he follows a breath down the beach

as human he was born in cut hair and broken chairs breakfast sausage and baked beans a letter

an enlistment a signature a mantel of silence enrobing his twisted limbs ■