#addonizio

Kim Addonizio

Today the cloud shapes are terrifying,   and I keep expecting some enormous   black-and-white B-movie Cyclops   to appear at the edge of the horizon, to come striding over the ocean   and drag me from my kitchen   to the deep cave that flickered   into my young brain one Saturday at the Baronet Theater where I sat helpless   between my older brothers, pumped up   on candy and horror—that cave, the litter of human bones gnawed on and flung toward the entrance,   I can smell their stench as clearly as the bacon fat from breakfast. This   is how it feels to lose it— not sanity, I mean, but whatever it is   that helps you get up in the morning and actually leave the house on those days when it seems like death in his brown uniform is cruising his panel truck of packages through your neighborhood.   I think of a friend’s voice on her answering machine— Hi, I’m not here— the morning of her funeral,   the calls filling up the tape and the mail still arriving, and I feel as afraid as I was after all those vampire movies   when I’d come home and lie awake all night, rigid in my bed, unable to get up even to pee because the undead   were waiting underneath it; if I so much as stuck a bare foot out there in the unprotected air   they’d grab me by the ankle and pull me   under. And my parents said there was nothing there, when I was older   I would know better, and now   they’re dead, and I’m older,   and I know better.

I like to touch your tattoos in complete

darkness, when I can’t see them. I’m sure of

where they are, know by heart the neat

lines of lightning pulsing just above

your nipple, can find, as if by instinct, the blue

swirls of water on your shoulder where a serpent

twists, facing a dragon. When I pull you

to me, taking you until we’re spent

and quiet on the sheets, I love to kiss

the pictures in your skin. They’ll last until

you’re seared to ashes; whatever persists

or turns to pain between us, they will still

be there. Such permanence is terrifying.

So I touch them in the dark; but touch them, trying.

I like to touch your tattoos in complete

darkness, when I can’t see them. I’m sure of

where they are, know by heart the neat

lines of lightning pulsing just above

your nipple, can find, as if by instinct, the blue

swirls of water on your shoulder where a serpent

twists, facing a dragon. When I pull you

to me, taking you until we’re spent

and quiet on the sheets, I love to kiss

the pictures in your skin. They’ll last until

you’re seared to ashes; whatever persists

or turns to pain between us, they will still

be there. Such permanence is terrifying.

So I touch them in the dark; but touch them, trying.