Stop | Repeat

By Bhanu Kapil Rider:

The feeling of my body. I feel like the man who is making a pathway through a forest of thorns. He wants to reach a place that does not exist until he touches it with his mouth. 

She has been sleeping for a long time. Brown crystals, like sugar, in the corners of her eyes. Her dreaming saliva has dried on her cheek, where it drizzled from her mouth. There are sparrows singing in the tree outside her window. People are shouting and embracing, as if they hadn’t seen each other in years. Then they remember.

When they open the door, he. Has sunk his nails. Into her hip. She is pressing. Her hand against. Her eye. Smearing it. Her hand. Against the wall.

They tear the man out of her body.

I am thinking of the man, how he reminds me of Christ: the bloody one; the lover who is torn from his beloved; the stranger who brings the gift of awakening, but who is executed at dawn; the exhausted traveler.