You ask me to mirror you. I don’t exist
to help you imitate yourself. I exist
to break silences you did not know,
to make you hear and unhear them.
I stab the known, careless of its resurrection,
I present the unknown in a gift box,
I devour the wriggling, lukewarm lies,
I echo drones with holograms.
What hurts, what helps—well, you grow.
Has your inertia yet bitten its own tail,
have you coughed up your stalled beliefs?
Are you perpendicular to the ground yet?
I craved great arms of information,
reaching, clasping, taking what they wanted.
An inconvenient fact took me from behind.
It still instructs, and I do not self-destruct.
You live: salted, hydrated, reconstituted,
unfolding at the unexpected word,
called forth by exhortations of tough love,
breaking silence in a way I knew you could.
Tucker Lieberman is the author of Painting Dragons: What Storytellers Need to Know About Writing Eunuch Villains and Bad Fire: A Memoir of Disruption. He has stories in Owl Canyon’s No Bars and a Dead Battery and Elly Blue’s forthcoming The Great Trans-Universal Bike Ride. His poems have recently appeared in Across & Through, Marias at Sampaguitas, Little Dog, The Conclusion, Esthetic Apostle, Déraciné, Neologism, and Defenestration. He lives with his husband in Bogotá, Colombia. www.tuckerlieberman.com Twitter: @tuckerlieberman
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