Booked
by Matthew Bruce Harrison
Slice your uncut nail
across the cover
to justify craving
another. Deny this dumb reason
you scratch moons
into the face
of Hunger, gusty
Knut Hamsun an ex
left. Her sheets of telltale skin un-
folded you, the rain-
bow zodiac of her
solar plexus inked
above tentacles
tugging a ship untold depths. Deepen
your mark: ply a bone
knife. Gut words
worthless. You maul
volumes for the thrill
of boundless prices to peel. Your scabs
itch. You require
new titles to plot
against. Your book
arrived a mess of art-
less packaging and filled with hexes
that reeked of semen,
torn out origami
hearts and cursive
hair stuffed back in
a rush. Remember halfway to Folly
Beach when a juvenile
heathen you loved
to lay out Happy
Meals on pictures
of Noah’s Ark and break each fry
in half to have two?
As flash floods
upturned the blood-
logged Black Belt
carving a shadow arc to the Atlantic
like God’s own
piss mark you felt
stuck in it ages
with leviathans
abreast the minivan. Each drop jammed
time and the wind-
shield’s road movie
went static, the trip
a paradox between
states, a Welcome wavering. Ma blew
smoke. You licked salt
from your fingers,
used your worn hand-
-me-down white-
belted taekwondo gi for a napkin. Bit
a nail sharp, stabbed
lion eyes and lamb,
snake and the forsaken
pterodactyl but let
all swimming things live lives of seeing
in your apocrypha.
In your daydream
you stowed away
awaiting the sun
to cue your flying kick through the keel
and the whole to gulp
the sea and the sea
to gulp the conceited
zoo. You pretend
to read better now, know many bones are dis-
articulate missives
of missed contexts
and ghosts are dolls
cut from godawful
autobiographies floating atop dark
histories. If you
have a beginning,
middle and an end
you have a whole
and if the whole has roof and walls
and voices to fog
memory it is more
or less a house-
boat, sinkable. From
the distance of sun- sets, masts burning
can recall pages
turning. Your boy-
hood Book of Genesis
is pulp and rainfall
since has echoed flames as your eyes
close those decades.
Go wreck. Go re-
construct. You borrow
each passage
and another pen will in the end
mark your fabled X
in a spot far under-
water. Relish your salt.
This ancient story
wormholes any- body, and you
forgot karate.
Matthew Bruce Harrison’s writing can be found in West Branch, Yemassee, Carolina Quarterly, Texas Review, Adroit Journal, Cincinnati Review, Bayou, Gargoyle and Permafrost, among others. His poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart and for the Best of the Net Anthology, and his fiction has been nominated for the storySouth Million Writers Award and was a finalist for the Mid-American Review Sherwood Anderson Fiction Prize. Originally from Georgia, he now lives and teaches in Minnesota.
