Sam Sax: How to Spell Reductive
he came wearing birth’s bloody jacket.
he came with no strings attached,
with no hands at all. he hauled all
the meat with him.
what kind of man wears his limbs
like that? a lunatic clock spinning
uneven arms until it’s dark out.
how is it the same man always?
the one who does his simple violence
in an ohio janitor’s closet, the one
who holds my wheezing body until
its breathing evens out. tell me
which man that is? the edge and the dull
back of a blade are both called knife.
who wears his body like a suit of arms?
tell me about testosterone’s white lab
coat, how it barks through the cage’s metal
bars. tell me a bruise can’t mean i love
you, and i’ll show you my neck when
he comes home from war. i’ve never known
a man who isn’t both fist and furniture.
who wouldn’t flip the switch or perish
in the kill shelter’s poison.
i believe there is nothing
innate in the body. why every time a scientist
opens a child he finds only what he expected
to find. why when i splintered a bird’s skull
with a brick in my young hands, a galleon
of bright wings spun out. why when my brother
saw the red feathers gasping
in my palm, two expressions crossed
his face at the same time.
SAM SAX is an MFA candidate at the Michener Center for Writers. He’s the two-time Oakland Grand Slam Champion and the two-time Bay Area Unified Grand Slam Champion. Sam is a recipient of the 2013 Acker Award for Poetry and has recently been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is the cofounder of the New Sh!t Show, a reading series currently running in San Francisco, Boston, and Minneapolis. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in: Anti–, The Boxcar Poetry Review, The Journal, Rattle, The Evergreen Review, Union Station Magazine, Gertrude, Muzzle, PANK, and other journals. His new chapbook, A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters, will be released through Button Poetry.
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