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ASSIMILATION by T. R. Hummer

January 1, 2010 Contributed By: T. R. Hummer

Even his fingerprints vanished. His skin smoothed like river stone; his grip on the world diminished. He was sliding someplace frictionless.

*

Lovers had become landscape–the woman he knew that ancient summer was lost in a hedgerow, flowering, leaving, framing what could be seen.

*

What he touched penetrated skin and clung, but he did not want to release the pen, sofa, wallet: they defined him as the boundaries faded.

*

The walls of the house have thickened, the rooms grown smaller; the foyer is just the size of a mailbox, and he gropes there for his bills.

*

Part of him was lost,two fingers from the right hand. His music suffered. When he played the piano, there was a shadow in the treble, a deadness.

*

Human emotion reduced him; every passion wore off a layer of skin, every rage took a subsection of organ. Eroded, he walked through walls.

*

He now remembers the path forgotten all his life: it leads to a ruined door through which everything vanishes, even the key that opens it.

Return to table of contents for Issue 2 Winter 2010

Filed Under: Poetry Posted On: January 1, 2010

Further Reading

The Nightmare Next Door
by Tom Larsen

My mother is standing on a bench in the spare bedroom. I can see by the certainty of her movements that she’s done this before. “Look,” she points. “They turned the refrigerators around. Sanders must have told them I complained.” Through the window I can see two rusting refrigerators standing flush against the back of […]

November
by Donna Fleischer

[Editors’ Note: An edited version of the following poem was published in chapbook form by Casa de Cinca Press. It is reprinted with permission here.] i. Prologue Lithuania, country of my grandmother’s body unfolding in the cave-like cotton motion of her sleeping gown       our dreaming feet entwined toward rest there    where I had never been […]

BUTTOCKS 123 by Hei Yue-Jishengli

Return to table of contents for PRACTICES, POWER & THE PUBLIC SPHERE Return to table of contents for Issue 2 Winter 2010

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