Fallacy
This week in the PEN Poetry Series, PEN America features a poem by Rusty Morrison
Fallacy
you mean to answer the husband honestly, but the plastic wrapper won’t give; at the beginning of any sacred rite the herald
commands silence;
you mean to offer something unwrapped, a backward step, even a stumble needn’t see itself as weak; kick your refuse into the corners you harbor until you reach the last page and
still no story;
you want refuse to need no specific color to be recognized, no previously indexed name;
the fly is back
in your kitchen again; try to remember something no one else knows, a short preface that cost-cutting editors left out of later editions; you mean to
speak outside roles,
wife, owner, miser; a wrapper, when it makes a noise, it’s like italics talking; any light on plastic might be shrine’s light; rapt; you had a use
for shadow once;
have you forgotten how to pray; the neighbor bought a new car, the neighbor lost control of her legs;
some people scour
under the rim of the toilet bowl; some people close your bathroom door then look; a plastic wrapping may be inanimate but possesses entirely its
diminished life;
the man sat down beside you at the bus stop, cupped his large hand around your small breast, released it, and walked away; a herald
uses silence
to focus an initiate outside the temporal, so as to set the surface plastic into motion; to answer a husband, you’d
have to hear him;
something your dead mother wouldn’t say; she was terrible at humor; but you could start now, teaching her; the refrigerator is humming, taller for its
lack of sequence
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