Here You Are Again
by Eva Glassman
With the scalpel and a smile.
Tell me again how to live
and why it is not the way
I am living, how
movies are real and the bodies
inside them, the bodies
with all their poreless
fucking—slim and sculpted
granules of nothing.
I live kindly, nimbly, ever-undoing
knots in my delicate chain
of blunders so that it may rest,
finally, at my heart. I live to make
new holes in the body—pierced,
studded, healing—to remind you
that we are always one wound away
from obliteration, a splattering
of blood on sheer, linen curtains
in the wind of a crime scene,
front door swinging. I live to eat
and be eaten.
I listen to you so I know
what not to tell my children.
Instead, I will tell them
of a full-fledged loving,
the kind that’s wet
and blights the bitter
stems of doubt, the full
plate at the table—the blunt
weapon I hurl back at you.
I will tell them of a rebellion so soft,
so swift, so precise—one that you will only
recognize as it threatens inside you
a real opening.