Fantasma
The world is wash, burn victim a
grief beset without antecedent. The
ground is what follows, a measure in
a space of abstraction that does
its best not to calculate the ways
in which the body’s cancers reflect
outward. Poaching: murder by
every other name, that which
remains seated so deeply that to
negate is to negate
everything, each artifice. Anything
that can be used to soak up, to
suture, expunge:
the parallel motion of the mirror
hides what’s trying to hide already.
Amish Trivedi is the author of Sound/Chest, has poems in Kenyon, New American Writing, Typo and other places. He has an MFA from Brown and is doing a PhD in Critical Theory at Illinois State.
