from the fissuring wound of the skull—cracked open on pavement1
by Bryan Lee
Because the deli machine, meeting flesh, cuts off my mother’s finger.
Because by then, my old man is on the ground, boot to nape,
echoing the Haida Gwaii shaped mark on my grandmother’s neck,
and a tip of a finger—which has disappeared like the Bering Strait—
drowned in water.
Try fixing a broken, brittle thing.
Assemble the larger parts, where each sharp edge neatly lodges into one another—like a jigsaw.
Note how smaller pieces crumble into dust. They have broken down to a singular point,
no longer have form. Evince: a shattered cup?—note the small divots near the glued shards—
a plate?—grooves, like rocky accretions by a shoreside pitch. Shards eroded into nothing.
In matters of obliteration, were I to scalpel a thin layer, past the gelatinous fat and unto
cranial bedrock, is bone more porcelain or glass? What do the staples look like, shoring the fissure?—
Dimpled I imagine, with stray, blade-shaped beaches—like stolen Pleistocene arrowheads2.
Long after the body is dragged away, the concrete soil is impastoed in a red pool.
Home is whatever earth you’re on while you’re bleeding out.
Bryan Lee
Bryan Lee is a writer and poet who grew up in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. Currently studying law at McGill University with a focus on diffuse conceptions of authorship and copyright, Bryan spends his spare time thinking about writing. His work is inspired by the city’s layered histories and the open-textured nature of experience.
- Home is where the bones rest—not mine, but bones there—where the seat is old and used, and where you are used to sitting in. Home is the genitive of remembering, where noun and place are attached—like hyphen-nouns, we do not obliterate, they suspend each other, like two hearts carved together, bound by center initials. Home is marked union like how a stroke of pen creates two ends.
“a sour?”—he says after a fist bump. “yes!—how’s the summer?”—I dissolve and am carried as he dissolves, and I carry—a sugar cube dipped in wine dark coffee.
Later on, I do not know where my fingers end, and where the chance meeting on Clark and Villeneuve begins. I have changed, died a thousand times already then. It carries me. You rest in fractured time: the noun is a calling. It says “Here!” while calling for what’s there. Why is the day’s radiance so distant from my eyes? How is the smell of touch felt?
To noun is to say: “come here, please!” Because I am not our conversation between Duluth and Clark, but I am nothing without it. Because the pink-fingered sky is something—and so is the grunt of tennis players. They contain me, as content and boundary.
↩︎ - The microscope is pointed at my father’s skull. ↩︎
Headlight Anthology 