In the Spleen of the City
The bad witness and the activist meet for coffee at the center of the city.
She is wearing a dress the color of a liar’s tears. He is wearing a frog mask that resembles a dirty ghost.
They chat about their childhoods in opposite-coast suburbias. In both cities, their bedrooms smelled like paperbacks and imitation vanilla.
They each had a friend who used to prick herself with beaded safety pins. Different young girls. Different colored pins.
Who is the activist? Who is the bad witness? Neither can remember.
If they kiss, their tongues will split into lightning forks and broken flutes.
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When the bad witness was an activist, she used to chain herself to her sister— or was it a doll?
She often forgets that she never had a sister.
At the playground, she would go up to babies and yell, “You’re not my sister.”
As an activist, she believes in the reality of the world.
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The bad witness gets a job as a poet-in-residence at a tattoo parlor, but all of her poems are just one word, stop. It’s an improvement on her pre-amnesia poems, and small enough to fit on most bodies without unbearable pain.
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Across town, the classrooms are being used to stockpile invisible guns. The frogs who sleep in the desks clamor for air, while the android teacher thinks her memory of her past life as a science-fiction action star is only a dream.
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Years pass, and the coffee shop starts serving moonshine right into people’s mouths. No cup needed. It’s the only way to deal with the constant lying.
As the activist and the bad witness chat, one of their bodies is replaced with a metal cage.
Now he (or she?) is only an iron structure, an enclosure of air with a dumb whale heart, beating inside.
Neither notices the missing flesh— the almost empty construction where a chest used to be.
Joanna Fuhrman is the author of five books of poetry most recently, The Year of Yellow Butterflies (Hanging Loose Press 2009) and Pageant (Alice James Books 2015). She teaches poetry and creative writing at Rutgers University and coordinates the introduction to creative writing classes.