A Clean Margin
My Knife Arrives
My knife arrives holding hands with the sun—
Soon after, I awoke,
then took the knife of my life and listened to the slice.
Hear the small slice I had been refusing to hear for years?
I executed: enough.
Enough of the half-truths,
and of the missing truth.
Enough of it arriving barefoot,
then three days late to boot,
and with blood on its feet.
I executed: enough.
You dishonest home to someone.
You've made rooms inside rooms inside rooms and called it a life.
Now standing in the wreckage,
you complain about the dust.
My heart's gone rusty loving you.
My hands mourned your beauty—
they're rusty too.
Do you understand?
Rusty.
My eyes rained for years.
Years.
They've become rusty, too.
And still, some hope sparks like a little light
through a house you kept dark.
I covered the flame.
You struck another match.
I covered the flame.
You struck another match again.
I covered the flame.
You watched.
I will never forget you watched.
And you watched.
And watched.
There are monsters who roar.
There are monsters replying politely.
There are monsters closing the door softly.
There are monsters sleeping beautifully.
And there are monsters waking without blood beneath their claws.
You were always so clean.
Or was everyone around you in the faith of looking away?
Look away.
Looking away.
And looking away, yet again.
And you—at the center of it—hungry,
always somehow starving.
But my heart remembers her rug,
her beautiful book of poems,
and every beautiful object
that might have existed between us.
Only they didn't.
Objects are innocent.
Poems are innocent.
Even memory:
it all eventually arranges itself honestly.
My brown-eyed boy was never there.
I made him up because the truth
of life's loneliness was too ugly.
So I gave you his beautiful eyes,
and in them my tenderness,
and out of your mouth my excuses.
I gave a monster years.
Years.
Years.
And years.
And sometime last night,
in night's dark,
I took them back.
Today at dawn you died inside me.
No funeral. No flowers.
No black dress.
No identifying your body.
There was only a silence,
and that I could breathe.
At last.
At last.
At fucking last.
I could breathe.
And somewhere inside me
the sun returned.
It might have been waiting
behind a locked door.
Imagine that—
or was only you in front of the light?
You, the extraction.
This removal.
This clean margin around the death.
Finally, I understand:
losing is the body rejecting poison.
It is the house throwing open its windows.
It is the knife washed clean.
It is the truth entering without knocking.
And the truth says:
At last.
At last.
At fucking last—
I am free.
Marni Fraser
0909.2026
VI:XL AM
Photo by Roman Odentstov, edited by me.
