The B Word
by Daniel Barnum
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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— |
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