A picture of a field taken upside down, blurred by motion
Bare trees
Roots through the pavement by a hardware store, across the crosswalk the ramp of a Family Dollar
Bent fibers of a cracked tree branch
Mostly where I was bruised, scraped, cut, lucky
I moved forward until a broken-off branch got caught in my wheel
Suddenly headlong I forced my body to turn, to land on my shoulder– as if to see behind me
The broken spokes of a bike wheel in the road
An actor moves on screen to the edge of his bed
his shoulder blade migrates upward
Mornings my shoulder’s chorus echoes the concrete’s scraped contact
Memories of beginning
The first projection of the world is upside down in the back of our eye
The brain interprets the upside-down world “upright”
A line is a sound repeating itself
A compulsion to put it back in place
Repeatedly a dancer flings his open hand toward the floor as if to dry off excess liquid
As if to sever
After a few flings his arm throws his body open in a circle
The x-ray is illegible but interpreted as evidence of no structural damage
She outlines an old injury and says calcified
A line is a crack asserting itself
The starred edges of a scar flare under my skin’s continuity
Fade to the horizon of past wholeness
I consider the new roads under pain’s bright openings
Repair weaves lineage into a loop
the scar wrapped around my father’s leg
Then I lay myself over its faults unaware of length or where I could fall in
Time’s a brace around the linearity of bone
When sounds “break off” it means they could have persisted
My body wound around the body of a struck tree
I let the ringing continue through me
The day we left him in our country my brother asked me to play the game we loved one more time I said
it wasn’t the last time
Three years later in California I collected glass bottles in black trash bags to buy the game
outdated images moved at a different pace on screen
The racetrack rendered slowly as I approached the pixelated sky
Which doesn’t heal
There’s a sound my throat makes because i still want now to say yes, to have said –
Is it wrong to restart
Time stretches and I tumble off one wrong trajectory onto another
When I take a picture without stopping, the trees grow down from the top of the frame, rooted to the sky
The body I have repeats loudly my freedom in having it, past wholeness past wholeness
The joints take long to reset
