 |  |  | |
| matthew gavin frank |  | 1. After Untitled Graffito at Il Museo Monumento al Deportato di Carpi "graffiti by Corrado Cagli" Because it ends with the topsoil, with experiment, the thumb is a benign asp. Because it laces one hand to another, though it can’t fly, it is a good chicken, though it’s red and facedown and lies still for every long word like a boy obsessed with haunted houses. Because the thumb ends with mantra, like Tehran, Sudan, the ghosts are the least of our worries. Because it’s a finch, the ditchdigger biceps hated after the advent of language, we are lit up in a glass torch, a lantern casing cut with constellation. That could be a windmill back there, if it wasn’t a firing tower. So, we think we can see the sky on the wall, its queendoms and broken pencils. Because a soldier ran a pinky bone through it, and I have the document to prove it, and the defibrillator that shocked us with its failings retuned what he took after he fell asleep on the butt of his gun, gave it to the dumbest heart, buried under sawdust in the coop. And so, as the stars fall, the thumb falls, because it is thirsty for falling, it wants to be kissed on its face by some laryngitic cantor, wants to be dirtied with pepper, to be a grandmother to the oil. It’s just a staid cork after all, we’re the ones who shot it skyward with our own thumbs, forced it to search for its original bottle—what a life!—the surprised hole to fill, but we all want to love it because it is dumb. Because we’re an ill-built cooperative of bricklayers—shouldn’t we have our hearts in our hands, or our lungs, or even our hips, some irrational whole that wouldn’t wake the soldier, underline our flightlessness, our egg-shitting, our pecks that can no longer break any skin? Faithful Earth, blue nostril to the Zyklon, heart inside me, you are unopposable, | |
| | | |