UNDERWORLD

Another excerpt from The Gay Divorce. Previously in this series: Bluebeard , Easter: The Resurrection, Voldemort, and April 7: The Birthday of J. Spaar.

Underworld

On the way to JFK 

I reread your old email

I do EMDR and a screenshot of you hovers in my brain, 

spirals, then spins the other way.

I’ll miss the trees and flowers,

the vegetation, the ecstatic gaze of the goats,

I’ll miss the hope that linked me to the rest of the world,

when there was finally a point to my body,

when you taught them to see me as useful because I was decorative.

I’ll miss the fact that I existed, but I’m learning to see the benefits in never having existed, too. 

I reread your “responses in line” to my little negotiations

pretending to slide the paper across the board room table,

As if you could promise that if I were to come back to you

you’d be able to stop. Six months ago,

you had spun out again, a dervish with a knife in each fist.

I was trying to wriggle upright, holding my guts in with one hand, 

while the other one’…