First Words
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First Words Phillip B. Williams A storm and so a gift. Its swift approach lifts gravel from the road. A fence is flattened in the course of the storm's worse attempt at language -- thunder's umbrage. A tree is torn apart, blown upward through a bedroom window. A boy winnows through the pile of shards for the sharpest parts from the blown-apart glass. He has a bag that holds found edges jagged as a stag's horns or smooth as a single pane smashed into smaller panes that he sticks his hand inside to make blood web across his acheless skin flexing like fish gills O-lipped for a scream they cannot make. He wants to feel what his friends have felt, the slant of fear on their faces he could never recreate, his body born without pain. When his skin's pouting welts don't rake a whimper from his mouth, he runs outside, arms up for the storm, aluminum baseball bat held out to the sky until lightning, with an electric tongue, makes his viscera luminescent; the boy's first word for pain is the light's new word for home. |
