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The B Word 
by Daniel Barnum


​don’t try to get around this one with logic
                                                                 until long after it’s over: what is the body? a word
I’d block out if I could. too slow yet central
                                                                  to the subject to avoid. too ubiquitous to get lost.
it has its costs. I wrestle with the thought
                                                                      of always taking too much​— space on this page
or any sidewalk​— sorry! there must be
                                                                          a simpler way to say I am afraid. a hieroglyph
to illustrate lungs forgetting their wet
                                                                    purpose; why shakes manifest as the young man
parrots my voice in songbird flippancy,
                                                                     then calm only if my palms quicken to fists. not
fits per se but how else does it look to any
                                                                    objective observer? that nocturnal conversation
with last week’s bus ride seatmate, who told
                                                                           me he’d only date str8 men. unbidden. guess
I’ve just got one of those faces. my posture
                                                                        wrenched in complement to my inner torture
while I listened, arms crossed to keep my own
                                                                           portion of grief from upsetting, under threat
of sudden graceless motion— wheels braking
                                                                     beneath. I sat frozen, unable to speak, like some
fucked-up statue of an angel slouching to feign
                                                                  a need for sleep. it’s not that deep— the common
pain of meeting new people only more so
                                                                    this miracle of muscle memory: once, a stranger
strangled my mother for money she refused
                                                                       to give him. he hid her petite inanimate inside
the empty prism of her purple canvas suitcase.
                                                       she stayed in there hours, contorted like her surname’s
carnival performers, bulging against the zippers
                                                                           he’d have struggled to draw closed. at dawn,
police suppose, he strode out of the crime scene
                                                                       toward the false greens of an adjacent country
club, carrying mom across his shoulders like a hunter
                                                           hauling a felled doe home. he dumped her into a non-
descript blue dumpster in the back alley
                                                                  edge of the same desert city where her childhood
had ended half a century before. witnesses
                                                                      said he acted as if he believed himself invisible.
it was all reported to me in this manner later:
                                                                               recited from county records and his hand-
written confession. I’m okay now— thank you             
                                                                             for asking— still stuck uncoupling concepts
of fellow man and murderer every time I’m tired
                                                                           or want to step outdoors. his eye’s on me. fact
or feeling – ​what’s their correct order? soon enough,
                                                                              I won’t think her corpse when I hear the b—                                   

Picture
Daniel Barnum lives and writes in Columbus, Ohio, where he serves as the associate managing editor of The Journal. His poems and essays are forthcoming from or have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Offing, Notre Dame Review, RHINO, Barrow Street, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere

Read More...
Would I Change All I Know for Unknowing by Daniel Barnum
Summer 2019
ISSN 2157-8079
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