VESTIGE
—For B
The body splits, and I remember when
I was a child and there was no such thing
to stifle air, no singular blade to cut through
hide—Only an idea of ache far off
in a corner, a dark strand tucked between
flowerbeds or poured into the vase by
my grandfather’s grave. In sleep
you turn, revealing the mark, the divot
on your back where they’ve lifted out
sourness, the golden fat, left the skin
to replenish and burn an impossible cell.
I came to face it first in your mother’s eyes
when she saw the mottled dip, knew
she envisioned her son taut and stern,
a man not waiving to the arc of chance,
and now—My fingers trace over
the fold of it, feeling bombs beneath my
nail beds, the hot crater of life busy in
a hunger that descends down toward
your spine, the core of you. Were they
always there, those particles of carbon,
of blood, their membranes fiercely turning—
or, what they say: metastasizing as I gripped
your shoulders, sucked from you a ripe seed,
waiting. A vestige of error. I want
to stoop down to your mother’s child
and smooth out the wrinkle on his scapula,
rend the root before it takes. Pattern
the stars in any other way if only to keep
his body’s form as it grows into you, your
figure, the sharp edges of our circumstance
rushing fast ahead.
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Clare Paniccia was born and raised in upstate New York and is currently a PhD student in poetry at Oklahoma State University. In 2015 she was a finalist for both the Janet McCabe and Slippery Elm poetry prizes, and in 2016 her chapbook manuscript Threaded Daughter / Threaded Child was a finalist for the Wells Press Chapbook Contest. Her work has been featured in or is forthcoming from Superstition Review, Radar Poetry, Puerto del Sol, Best New Poets 2015, and elsewhere.
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