Hollowed-out shoulderblade of a musical pterodactyl,. The fingers touch like blind twins in adjacent gestational sacs learning the face of their captivity. Angelically ungainly, swung absurdly through closing subway doors,. What do the doctors know of verbal labor, of gulped-down decibels of childbirth? Every so often, you leap off a cliff with harpsichords taped to your flapping arms.
Metaphors, like the long bones, so hollow gravity can whistle through them. You were born a pterodactylβ you, with your winged words. These gut strings, heart strings, living wires that electrocute you feel alive to no one else. He entered standing up, his hands behind his back. She had to cling to him because she knew if she let go she would fall and hang herself.
It turned him on, how she clung to him. She was ten when it happened. She was fourteen when I did her intake interview on my Child and Adolescent Psych rotation. She had emptied a childproof bottle of pills over the hollow in herself at the fairy tale stroke of midnight. This was a yearly thing for her. My brother redrew the lines on his palm with an X-acto knife. Shaved his right eyebrow, shaved lightning zigzags into his buzzcut temples. Pierced the nipples that would give blood but not milk.
Headphones jackhammered the pavement of his birth body to reveal an underground city where he was secretly a native. I think about him sometimes, I wonder about the underground scene. We never hear from him. He moved there at seventeen tossing fifty Valium into the tollbooth coin basket as he gunned his body home. He went to war with his birth. I know how I must seem to you with my side part and my three kids, but I had a twin brother whose bunk lay empty every couple months while he slept with gravewrapped forearms in the child and adolescent psych unit downtown.
Excuse my double knotted shoelaces and my model-minority smile, but my temples ache when I remember him. My palm lines tingle and turn to ants carrying all the sweetness out of my life. I hold the dripping razor to my eyebrow, daring him to grip my wrist and guide it. Amit Majmudar is a poet, novelist, essayist, and translator. He works as a diagnostic nuclear radiologist in Westerville, Ohio, where he lives with his wife and three children.
