| John Riley |
Permission to Goread by nic sebastian Now that the last incision has been sutured, the last blood stain washed away, the last dry pink pore salved, the last pill powdered, the last tumor appeased; now that the necessary implements acquired, the stainless steel femur, the bolted hip, the tubes, needles, sipping cup, all those accumulated instruments, and more, have been buried away in the box; now that the last brown shadow, (it clung like crumbs on a child's grimy lip) has been scrubbed from your face; now that I have no cause to stagger up the stairs, my eyes left empty, fat gray; I am granting you permission to go. Now that I have at last dreamed that your shriveled black lungs filled, and emptied, and from empty filled again full of the flashing phosphorescence and the steady green eyes of the darting fish; now that I have seen you, by this motion of fill and empty, rise to float above the bed's shadow; I am granting you permission to go. Now that I no longer sleep to see you, propelled by this motion that is not magic, speed away above the flat light; now that you will never again curve beyond the eye's hand toward what is there only by our demand it should be; now that all these things touched and all these things seen have been housed inside me, I am placing this plea before your new absence; I am requesting your permission to leave.  © Bahram Ghonchehpoor Prostateread by taylor mali When the doctor returns with the news the man remembers how his wet hair turned to ice the night he jumped from his bath and ran across the smooth field, a boy, alive, water dripping from his hairless crotch, drawn into a winter night by the need to move, his feet pounding the potato dirt, frozen on the surface, warm and moist beneath, where his summer fingers will never again dig. He thinks of years later, of the old tobacco farmer, drunk each day from dark to dawn. How the tractor tilted when it crushed the farmer's arm and shoulder. How his scream snapped across the half-plowed field. He wants to tell the doctor about the man's question. He wants again to hear the boy whisper 'live?' John Riley is the founder and publisher of Morgan Reynolds Publishing, an independent educational publisher in |