we touch like cripples
posted May 15, 2007
(The arms are dull butter knives. Rounded at the ends
like baseball bats. No hands: unable to cling,
to grasp with urgency. Able to embrace
but don’t. No fingers mean no music can be played. Opening doors
is extracting confessions from the innocent. Hard-fought, meaningless.
Shame is elicited from breathing. Stay at arms length
like careful doctors. The arms, trying to carve braille
into the foreheads of blind women. The deaf
can’t hear car bombs removing the faces of buildings
or the hum of bees. With no one speaking
is there a difference? The handless long for sign language.
Arms waving, trying to signal passing ships that aren’t there.)
© 2007 Joseph Kerschbaum
Dead Stars Have No Graves, was published by Pathwise Press in April, 2006. Recently he received funding from the Indiana Arts Commission and the NEA to complete his next chapbook, How I Lost My Arm.
lives in Bloomington, Indiana. His latest chapbook,