Rough Cuts

A Poetry Chapbook

By Allison Nusbaum

- Table of Contents – Process 2 Artists 3 Death 4-5 Surgical Wound 6-7 Glass 8-9 Love 10 The Giant 11 Sun and Moon 12

Process

Depression is a sour stone

You suck on

And spit out poetry

2

Artists

What is it with these artists? Dragged along by an unseen force To paint, to write, to play What do they see In the bottom of a heroin needle or in cutting off their ear? We see them not so much as humans As prophetical travelers From a world we cannot perceive Spewing madness And trying to reach us

3

Death

Death. No one is the same. Not even the mechanical conformity of the modern genocide Can conform a person’s being Each experience as individual as a fingerprint The same event and yet not the same The mass of translucent flesh and 100 billion brain cells Out and breathing for only a few hours Harsh muscle, young eyes Culture, biology and self at the cusp of permanent arrangement Forced into meaning at the end of a bayonet Half senseless beast blundering about Ended by the contact of a mechanical horse Didn’t have long anyway Ancient being, Too much life in him to hang on now, much longer It creases the skin, this wealth of living Any moment to take the full payment For the decadence that is life 4

Not human, not animal One of trillions, Picked And placed in the vase On the windowsill Quietly Withering away It is a whole, a half, an eighth a sixteenth rest In the music of life Which may yet have to hold on for a fermata Cruel music, no? 5

Surgical Wound

It sits there

The man’s leg

Like a cut of lamb

White, wet muscle

Never meant to see the light of day

The sterile talc professionals flit past the open wound

Full of Red

But not bleeding

Hours earlier

The surgeon took a knife

A heavy, sharp knife

Just below the man’s breastbone

And carefully, carefully cut into just the skin

Like your father would the Thanksgiving turkey

In a line halfway down his chest

A clever weighted device

Holds back the skin from closing back in

6

The man is no longer there

Long gone under 500 mg of amethocaine

His face still and peaceful

As gloved hands

Rearrange the delicate piping of his body

Like a game of Jenga

7

Is there anything more forbidden

Than breaking a glass thing?

To drop a vase, a cup

A glass bird

They live

Between air and solid

Between light and weight

They defy

Us lumbering

Mismatched

Sweating

Coughing

greying

crying

lined

Species

With our bare eyes

Ten knobbly fingers

And two legs

A strange creature, even to ourselves

Stranger still to the animal world

8

Glass

But glass

Lives in the perfection of our thoughts

And the elegance of nature

Pity the child who

Shatters the paperweight

Reaching into its sparkling depths

As you would the doctor

Cutting into the cadaver

Both seeking to know

The deepest truths

Of their existence

9

Love

Love,

Our unending, ceaseless project

The burden of our species

Remade every day

In this great breath that we call life

10

The Giant

I sleep between two mountains

As a hammock

I keep an elephant for a pet

Catch a cloud to wash my face

Dip my toes in lakes

And clean my feet with the tops of trees

Have to wade out into the ocean

For a swim

Careful not to knock the whales

Dry myself off in the desert

Pick a tree

For my elephant

Watch my footprints

Fill with rainwater

And the animals flock to them

Walk back up to my valley

And try to sleep

Despite the stars

11

Sun and Moon

No mere pinpricks in the sky

Or ephemeral, every changing forms

But a solid presence

To ground a species

12

The End

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