one black pixel

By Nancy K. Pearson / Issue 20

the creep starts pointing it all over the place saying
ah, sweet bro, this gun is kickass

so I pretend to grip his gun
high on the back strap

bend my shoulder-apart knees slightly
align the top of the front sight with the top of the rear sight

at first the target is blurry
focus bends the light—

like at the river’s surface
how my hand breaks

when I point it
at my reflection

*
can you wrap leather skin around any set of bones
work it into an architecture and call it a stuffed buck, chop off

the lavender heads of the yellowing chives
& hyssop or break

the fennel’s soft susurration
and still have the whole thing/

self?

when the creep licks your neck like a dog
you imagine a hand whistle, you suck in your breath

curl your fingers around your mouth
your index finger outstretched as if it were a gun

it starts when I listen to myself for too long
the sunburnt casing on the river & jawbone’d clouds

moon & whiskers erect on a fox’s forearms
white-hot beer cans in the grass, my hip skin white

after all these years he came back to say I still own you—he’s a fuck-job
my therapist said the clinical name is fuck-job

*
woke with my fist curled inside his fist inside
me & the ochre scent of leaves, crickets’ wings inside the walls

broke my clavicle, a child naked as a full glass of milk
what can you expect

the creep broke the ribs of my first white cat with one fist
I’d rather love from a distance

feel like a wet rug beaten clean in snow
an animal keeping her distance, her elbow bent

her hand side-gripped,
a barrel in the middle of his ear—

I’m flying out, as dark & small
as one black pixel on an amberwing’s wing

NANCY K. PEARSON is the author of the poetry collections, The Whole By Contemplation Of a Single Bone (“Poets Out Loud Prize,” Fordham University Press, 2016) and Two Minutes of Light (Perugia Press, 2008), which won the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award. Two Minutes of Light was also named a “Must Read Book” at the 2009 Annual Massachusetts Book Awards and was a finalist for The Lambda Literary Award. Pearson’s awards include two seven-month writing fellowships at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, two Inprint Fellowships, and others. Her poems appear in a wide variety of journals, magazines and anthologies such as The Oxford American Magazine, The Iowa Review, and The Alaska Review, Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. Ed. Melissa Tuckey (University of Georgia Press, 2016) and Ordinary Genius, A Guide for The Poet Within by Kim Addonizio (Norton, 2009).