N. Cuzzi
how moving it was to watch the pianist play while the ice shelf cracked and slid into the ocean,
how devastating, how free, this very third person with a very third shadow, phasing, 19 year-olds, great catastrophes, grenades, the boy was a wounded dog in the way boys are wounded dogs, slicing each star off to crush you, Diego de Landa was a conquistador, burned an entire Mayan library to the ground in the name of Jesus, there was smoke but really it was grieving bats and monarch butterflies, if suffering exists, but we know not the source of our suffering, how do we know to pull the sunlight down? I once knew another boy named Diego and we pretended we were in gangs, his brother Jesus, too, both living at the same apartment complex, the one I have fond memories of, but not many, where next door I kissed a different boy, our lips two close words, tourniquet / bouquet
humans will never fully recover from this amputation, the ice shelf breaks into the ocean and, one day, inevitability, melts, Queen Isabella too, there, for a moment, your face fell off into the well, into the cenote upon which sight is whirled dark like space energy, where drowning phantasms will not disappear and instead stay, screaming at the men who followed that boy, for the stars will obliterate us all
but there is a man in Cambodia named Ven Phath, he is missing his left leg below the knee due to a forgotten mine from a recent war, twice a week he sits on his bed, positions a mirror on the inside of his lost leg, reflection of his right makes it look like both are intact, look, move, imagine, another amputee says, instructing Phath, Phath moves his right leg, imagines the left moving, watching the reflection, reminding the body, you see, the pain he feels daily, in the leg that is gone, is not unreal, in the way loss is a continuity, but then something else
in the mirrored image he feels whole, I feel better already, Phath says, body memory of what was, intact, why not? how are we supposed to understand this? totality? wholeness? at all?
nova, noun of taking, serenity, Diego, a wide berth for an echo indeed, the other disembodied voices, running beside you in the field, to save you, could have been be avatars for an alternate fate, in which you were reared without a horrific guide, or you loved us
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N. Cuzzi is a bookseller, poet, and musician. They were born and raised in the Bay Area, and live and work in the Sunset, San Francisco.