Abby Johnson
To Drink the River Lethe Dry
I stuck my finger into the skin where the stitches were, out oozed the
sunset, it made me anxious.
In examination of the wound, I found a stunning lack of emptiness.
The skin was kissing its cousin, puckering closed with influence of
thread, but love cannot keep closed an open.
My kingdom for a crooked memory: a skin with no scars, a stunning
lack of sunset, no muscle tensed to flinch.
In the absence of cause, there is the bloody instinct. Body lives a life I
take no part in, owns a catalogue of memories inaccessible.
Memory makes me a sensitive beast. My inefficiency knows no bounds.
I trot out into the woods to fur myself in moss on the cold
side of the tree. It makes me anxious. I misremember the simplest
name, but hear every bodily phenomenon in the pitch it was intended.
