ambient head
by Maggie Von Sacher
image source unknown
I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody great or small can be ruined
except by his own hand.
– Oscar Wilde, “De Profundis”
I longed, as a young boy, to work directly with the angel. The eunuch Fortune. From my wet bike, I could see the infernal doors open, the mangled cry filling our small, wood house. Grandma and Mama were not justice-seeking people. Still, an ordinance grew around my health. My education, and my life.
The cold of the refrigerated aisles was sharp. I accidentally pulled on the lever of a bulk-store, grain falling around my bare shoulders while Grandma bashed my head. You laughed. I would later convince myself I could tell what your face was like before ever stopping to turn around. The more likely truth is You were beautiful, and it made me faithful.
They will call me woman-killer now. Not because I hated women, but because I made a rash decision based on a hatred of something less definite. You would not have gotten yourself here. You never got very angry or scared. When our campsite was approached by two other men, You doused our fire. You were calm when you said to me that, in the dark, we could not be appraised for size.
No more admonishment can come to me than what is already inscribed by the violence of this system. I eat prison gravy. And bread that has the texture of a ceiling tile. I bid from my mind the image of globular, sea-flesh my teeth could pull apart.
Here, hyperreal virtues reveal themselves. Those which are not based on ordinary time, but jail time.
AMBIENT TIME happens to me in the jihad.
And the criminally acquitted do not seem living as they leave through the procession of sealed doors.
In the TV room, small cups are passed around with favors inside, paper stars and shoddy pencils. Some of the men seem to want to be here forever. They fight to kill like there is honor in it. Gossip spreads during lockdowns. The secret lives of prisoners. Both anathema and greatly essential to the prison’s function.
The rejoinder to our BODILY PAIN is to give us more activity.
I am not anchored by simple words, or something like the thought of ham in a frying pan. A warm room, bright with pleated, yellow curtains.
In the den of the house, I kept a box with a respirator mask under my bed. When I played, I was the only man left in a deeply polluted atmosphere, skulls rolling by my feet in the red rain. Mask over my face, the memory of Earth like a weed.
From art to EKPHRASIS, back into the mill of art.
Grandma. Struggles to read. Mama. Fills the house with drugs. Comes and leaves whenever. The direction of the change of hands was always unclear to me. It happened so many times.
The rule was I never asked for any outside help. I felt called to move closer to family as if towards an eternally fungal, surface infection. I can no longer engender the cycle of fear, nor the hope for separation. What happened to me had already happened to the women in my line.
Part eunuch, part feathered nymph. Fortune is not an oracle. Fortune won’t tell me how a man comes to love another man when the world is against it. It is like the miracle of hair sprouting.
When You slept at the computer next to me, your drool pooled on the college-brown, speckled tabletop. I could lay my cheek down in it, to relish in the stupefied onlookers. In the auditorium, there was an organ so loud, we felt it could explode a bird, or break its own ceiling.
I was driving to a party, out far enough where the trees gathered and there was cattle. The car that had been in front of me for miles was sputtering and had just broken off into a long driveway. I didn’t see her walking. She was like one of Magritte’s windows. For Magritte, there would have been no incident, only the same length of silence.
I learned later her name, old-sounding for a teenager. I am sure You would tell me what to do besides measure my actions against those of free-society. A canon of angels is underfoot at all times, all sharing Fortune’s name. They make me forget at night, so I wake up every morning, do it to her again, and hit the gas to drive away.
The medicine I take I convince myself is little capsules of granite. My stomach bleeds from little holes in a way I can’t prove to anyone. In the prison library, fights break out related to drug deals. The manacles are ever-tightening.
There is a sense that this pain is the cost of AFFLUENCE.
A plaque from one of the prison compound buildings reappears in my dream. I don’t remember the name on the plaque, only the one-sided extolling.
When I hear laughter I am sure it is yours, then my cloistered life is forced apart from my actual living. I hope for compassion from You now, not later. But it is a type of self-deceit to amble alone with a memory, when it takes a whole community to forgive.
Once, I heard something like the clatter of dice in your bag. You had brought me vintage chess pieces. They were heavy, and some broken. I thought about how there was no accounting for what ritualistic humiliations some objects could come to mean.
They switch me up from job to job here. Work the grounds for A WHILE Then laundry then
the kitchen My roommate Impersonal QUIET I should never complain if let from
these walls Every blight and adulteration of common good
Going in the direction of love Chain saw
Pried from SCOURGE Brought up in existing theories
Not the SWEET-DEATH Strictness of hygiene I’m sure, with more time The Good
Experiments breed insight The leftover standalone face Space without Mortar
Greater HUSK OF GOD Form the self-prison Your clean neck
Maelstrom In the attic All calm outside The echo an ongoing conversation
INSTINCT
Killed
Killed
Forced into the air The body sealed away That Cannot catch itself
On the upper floor, there is only one sliver of window that prisoners can access, lofted almost too high. All the neighboring buildings are for prison operations, so there is nothing that might indicate life but the timed movement of trucks beyond the front gates.
Fortune stabs like a quill. The worst pain I have brought to the world is not to myself, and I will have to live with that. The prisoner is somehow everywhere.
The same slop is meted onto the same plate which hasn’t worn at all with use, and when You were an infant, your tears commingled with your sense of right and wrong-doing, which is why, I think, You are so removed from me.
The pavement was swelling with retained heat when they would have loaded her into the ambulance. I had driven without thought to the old house, the porch littered with cigarette ash and recycling bins.
I stood there with you many years before. You were dropping off a case of water to help us cope with the power outages. You wrapped your hand around my wrist, supporting it, and said, “This was as far as I ever wanted to go.”
Maggie Von Sacher is a writer. You can find her at @teacherother on IG.
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