The Person We All Become

There is a light on in the cellar,
a yellow glow that is yearning to be white—
a glass bulb that will never know fire
but singes your fingers
all the same.

There is a game you once played:
you would hold your breath
as your mother’s car entered The Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel
and you would nearly suffocate yourself on a weekly basis;
the thought of the weight and pressure
of all of that water above and around you
was like drowning without the flailing,
the gasping and the flashes of miniscule life
before your eyes.

There is another game you play where you try
to interlock your toes with mine,
regulated in the way the cuff of your pants leg
clings stubbornly to your ankle
as we peel them off and kick them from the bed.

There are cuticles growing too high for you
and you must push them down, for
that is not how anatomy was intended;
it is still hard to fathom that fingernails are
extensions of bone
and that when you cut an earthworm in half
it grows into two bodies,
forever linked in the dirt.

There is a corner in the attic
where a cobweb has entangled a moth
that recently perched upon a discarded board
that once bore the chains
of the swing that used to hang from
your grandmother’s porch.

There is a laden monotony
and the years of knowledge swept into forgotten corners
where grime, debris
and the smell of a woodstove long since removed
tell the stories of tepid autumn afternoons
where we once looked into a pile of ash and an empty bottle
and thought we had,
for the very first and last time,
discovered who we really were.









Barry Napier has had more than thirty short stories and poems published in various journals. He is the author of The Final Study of Cooper M. Reid and the short fiction collection Debris. His first novel, The Bleeding Room, will be published in early 2011. He enjoys coffee, minimalist ambient music, and irony. Learn more at: barrynapierwriting.wordpress.com.