A7
Collective Memory
Excerpt from novel: A longitudinal case study into motherlessness.

facing graceless heavens

heart poundfully still,
dead, technically,
all internal organs irrelevant
now that brain no longer fires and lungs no longer fill.
with a smile reaching toward each earlobe
i am ushered in by wing-ed things,
each avoiding eye contact with me;
some of their noses toward the ceiling,
others at the floor
and all of them above me
because Biggest had already forgiven their dirtly doings.

“so cook me,” i tell them,
and spit into the gaping mouth of Michael,
not the one you’ve heard of,
but Michael from my seventh grade home room
who held a friendly hand on my shoulder when he spoke to me
but behind me told all the boys in the class
that I jerked off looking at myself in the mirror
while sucking a stick of string cheese.
i told them that i didn’t even like string cheese,
but it’s hard to dispel a rumor as specific as that one,
especially between twelve year olds.

she is here, by the way, my mother,
worried for my verdict
as the Biggest himself starts up the VCR
(“the technology up here is so dated,”
i whisper to Archangel Stephanie, to whom i am cuffed).
they play back petty thefts and impure thoughts,
using the Biggest’s name without proper cause,
lyings about wrongdoings, and then
me jerking off at the mirror
while sucking on a stick of string cheese,
laughingly Michael (from home room) takes the remote,
rewinds and replays repeatedly,
until dead mom is sobbing, sobbing, and plugging her ears
and of a sudden i wish i could have been there for her playback,
to hear about what died with her
instead of the charitywork that lingered around afterward
until that was all anyone could remember.
but here it’s no different from the portrait everyone made of her:
wings pressed, beautiful blamelessly, radiant and kind,
made up entirely
of soft and empty sheep’s wool.

then the VCR plays the thought that i’ve just had
for everyone to hear, saying,
“i wish i could have been here for my mother’s playback,
to hear all of the terribilities that died with her:
to see her stealing from her grandmother
to hear what she regretted
and to know that maybe she, too, jerked off in embarrassing ways.”
at that everyone looks gasply and pale —
including Biggest (who made me),
and Michael (from home room),
and Michael (the one you’ve heard of) —
all craning their necks at me
except for my mother, who’s throwing up sweetly
into her woolish belly.

scenes like these play behind my eyelids
on nights when i am unable to sleep.

Samson Manoah