American Chordata: Magazine of New Writing Issue One, Spring 2015 | Page 86
Curio Storage
68 • PO
ETRY
The same way that when we form a thought we pull the
indiscriminate red-knobbed levers of the thousands of slot
machines in the casino, we’re immobilized as we scan
without conscious effort the millions of possible symbols
we know and their combinations, reeling to the clamor of
their own ill-tended and faux-gilded machine parts like
Fortune’s Wheel, they click click clack to a lackluster stop
and reveal our thoughts, whose expression is only as rich as
the winning or clunky combination we’ve earned, as we
have nothing to show for our games of chance but the
minted tokens which compose our speech, far removed
from the context of their sweeping or rather unimpressive
victory (meriting only a shrug of indifferent resignation). In
the nanoseconds for which endures this fateful spin that I
have never known in speaking, never having spoken, but
observed with envy and rancor in others, I entered a space
of gray matter very different from the casino. The event
horizon I broached revealed the clinically lit, expansive
reaches of a curio storage, whose limits I failed to define by
the eye unaided. Circular, cherry wood curios, shoulderhigh, on three legs, with a light built in at the top. Curios to the
n t h p o w e r. Cu r io s a r r a n g e d i n a g r id , id e nt ic a l ,
ceaseless. I began a curious tourage among them, peering
into each, shadowed by my breathing and their creak under
the weight of their own emptiness. Every shelf of every
curio, irreproachably clean, no layer of dust in this chamber
of the incumulable. Only many numberless spotlights
shining down on their exhibitions of tiered blank glass. I gleaned
t herein, in t he in f in itesima l ly sma l l elapsement of
time thus far, that yester remained beyond my grasp
eternally. I, who have never known a yesterthing, was not
made to remember, to plumb the falsehood called my self. I
was a rag, made not to retain the puke and tears and dust,
only to clean them away, make them as if they and nothing ugly
or c h a r m i n g or p oi g n a nt a nd ov e r w he l m i n g e v e r
happened. I am the absolver of goosef lesh, I knew. And
time resumed its indelible course.