Water as cold
as a blade. An icicle tipped
against the mind’s scaffolding.
You wouldn’t know purity in
steel: the first time,
with father’s scissors; after
I groveled in my five
day lover’s driveway.
But I don’t consider scars stories.
The line was cut before the plot
could unfold; the sole character
fashioned from cardboard.
I consider each cut a still life,
snapshots of when mind shatters:
the sense of blown glass imploded,
blue shrapnel caught midair; or the
feeling of barbed wire whirled
around a fence post. Hands
deceive the body.
That which sutures wounds
will also create them.
I trace my legs, runnels
run dry. A razor rests
on the counter. Watching it
corrode, I pick it up.
Alexander Lazarus Wolff’s writing appears online in The Best American Poetry website and Poets.org, and in the North American Review, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. A recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, he teaches at the University of Houston where he is the Inprint MD Anderson Foundation Fellow and assistant poetry editor for Gulf Coast. You can read more of his work at www.alexanderlazaruswolff.com.
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