Flesh and Bone: Five Prose Poems

"Listen to Silence" collage by Tiffany Dugan

by Lara Chamoun

The Scar

Before the cave drawings spoke your name and the bones beneath your skin began to hum, there was the scar. Before your mother’s hands became tools of excavation, unearthing splinters from your flesh; before the empty spaces between the stars at night began to stretch and sag with the weight of the things you forgot, like that favourite toy ball you lost, there was the scar. You trace its rough edges in your flesh, its ridge a worn fossil, and it undulates beneath your fingerprint and pulses warmth. You shift in the night, in the creases of your bedsheets, to where the fabric is cooler, to where your skin is smooth, almost slick.

Before the sand scattered and the tides licked the shore, the moon guiding them to erase your footprints, there was the scar. Before the wild-eyed man with pockets full of teeth, before your wisdom teeth, before the tooth fairy and your baby teeth, before they promised to make you whole again, you wandered into a forest and reached down hollow trunks. Before that there was the scar, and it felt like the bark as you pressed your fingers to it, the story carved into your skin. You whittled a spear and hunted a doe, you tore into it with your bare teeth, and before that there was the scar.

Before the valley swallowed you whole and before there were flowers, before your choking bounced off stone walls and sunk into the ground, before there were ashes and before your father’s voice slackened to leather and you nearly set fire to the leather couch, there was the scar. There was the scar under your leather jacket, there was the scar under your jean jacket, your winter jacket, your raincoat. You could see it right through the fabric; you could trace it in its creases. You couldn’t forget it on the surface because it was so persistent.

Before the sky turned to stone and the ground crumbled, there was the scar in the way you walked with your arm bent like a fish hook and your leg bending with it. It was there, in the lilt of your voice as you asked for cookies, for a kiss, for a few more minutes. It was there in the curve of your neck when you tilted your head to ask why.

Before the gaps between the clouds began to widen and before sleep became a distant memory, the scar became a distant memory, laying quiet like the space between your breaths. It faded like a whisper after your first words squeezed through your throat, slimy and strangled. There was the scar before your first words rolled from your tongue and squeezed their way through your throat, slimy and choked; before you discovered you could mimic the sound of raindrops on the window; before you learned interpretative dance with kitchen utensils and the most creative uses for rubber bands; before you named every squirrel in the neighbourhood and rescued a family of ducks from a storm drain; before you learned to decipher the patterns of moss growth on old buildings and realized they all looked like your family; before you took a plastic pail and shovel into your backyard and dug until you found a fossil that was really a stick; before the scar was bleeding flesh that gravel had bitten the first time you fell from your bicycle.

The Bone Collector

When light is dimmed by amnesia, you’ll gather bones by searching for detached echoes: they’re scattered like the places where reverberations are gathered in alcoves. Look for indifferent objects; look under piles of dead leaves; look beside lost pennies; look next to moth-eaten shawls. You’ll find a rib in the dust of a carousel’s creaking; you’ll see that it has a surface like old wood that pocketed laughter fallen between cracks. You’ll find a scapula beneath a rusted swing with a sagging smile, slick from the residue of the sugar and dew in the air. You’ll find the collarbone curled around sandcastles and crumbling plastic pails, shimmering like the deserts after a sprinkling of liquid glass. You’ll have this gnawing hunger for phosphorescent pain.

You’ll find a rib on the pews of a filthy church, you’ll find it stained with bruises like mould and humming in the silence of rotting glass. You’ll catch this muted reminder of hymns and crying around your restless limbs. You’ll find a phalanx in the threads of a spider’s web that tastes of rain-soaked tin. You’ll find a skull on a stage with a flimsy cardboard set in an empty auditorium. Alas, poor you; you knew her well. You’ll lift it and find it weighs a poem, have it face its phantom audience and ask for a joke.

You’ll find a rib wrapped in the patterns of a quilt, you’ll embrace it and feel it stab your stomach with some kind of softness. You’ll find an ulna in a folded yellow map with dots of ink like footsteps, leading to someplace drawn wrong because once upon a time it hadn’t been properly discovered. You’ll find the sternum flat and centre in a bouquet of flaking brown roses, tinged with a sweetness like decay, bruising you like a festering fruit.

You’ll arrange the bones on a wooden-echo table beneath a soft red and light and watch them form the silhouette of a timeless ego; you’ll notice the familiar bite of gravel and your escape from the darkroom: the cold metal of bicycle handlebars that once burned. You’ll run your entire withered arm across it and remember the ache of a small wound’s permanence.

The Mannequin

You find her in an attic somewhere, porcelain skin glinting in the half-light, wearing a dress of dust, and you wonder if you’ve ever been a tailor. You recall the dust, but not holding a thread. Her painted eyes are close to glinting, the colour of emeralds, because of course an artist would forget that eyes are never that green. Her lips are taut, in a line so straight that the feeling behind your eyes tries to bend their tips upwards.

You bring her home in a downpour, drape her in your plastic yellow poncho. You have to pause to raise the hood over her smooth oval head when you realize that the paint from her eyes is running. You worry because her neck seems so slender that you worry just the weight of the yellow plastic will snap it. The rest of her doesn’t need a raincoat; you laugh as the droplets slide right off her because she’ll feel nothing. You shiver all the way home.

You share your first meal at breakfast time, and you prop her up at the table with cereal boxes. She stares at you, lips slightly parted, as you let porridge settle in your stomach. She listens to you chew with fiberglass ears barely hinted at by her perfectly shaped head. This bothered you. It must’ve bothered her too, she was crying: paint tracks meshed with rain stain her cheeks.

Every day now you brush her hair: you chose from your closet the fluffiest wig, dark hair to conceal her unfinished ears. You’re very careful to place her hair to hide any unfinished touches. Every day you paint her nails a different colour, every day your hands tremble a bit less. The first day was your first time holding a bottle of nail polish, you were scared of breaking the tiny bottle as you brought her stiff fingers into yours and imagined the contours of her cuticles with the little brush. Every day now you dress her in the sequined dresses and feather boas and heels that dominate your closet. You wear the oversized grey sweater and worn jeans and scruffed shoes. She joins you in the living room and poses gratefully as you slouch, you grasp her hand and mould yours to fit in between her fingers perfectly. You watch old movies and let the popcorn sprinkle across her lap.

You bring her to dinner parties, double-dates with your friends, and explain that she’s the perfect listener, a date that won’t need small talk. You introduce her as Marianne and laugh so that they will too. You push her on a swing at the park and laugh to match the children’s giggles. You move her leg to just the right angle to craft a memory. In your workshop, you sculpt her smile and chisel away at the old wood. You didn’t do a very good job: now that she’s smiling she’s mocking. You’re not very good at crafting gestures of affection.

One evening, you dress her in the wedding gown in the back of your closet, make sure her veil hides her ears. You dance in the living room with your bride and twirl to a song that only you and maybe the cockroaches can hear, gently grasping the stiff arm around your neck.

That night, you tuck her into bed and read her poetry about love. You stop when your words begin to echo and she’s still crying her painted tears. Why was she still crying? You did what you were supposed to. You trace the perfect lines of her face and wish they were familiar, longing for warmth that once graced your fingertips.

The Reflection

You find yourself enamoured with the fact that her eyes aren’t quite your own, and they twinkle in the glass like a second heartbeat. You stand transfixed as she smoothes her hair with a grace that seems almost like serenity. She applies her makeup with practiced precision, the mirror framing her face like artwork. You’re in a museum; you stand close to the painting but don’t dare reach out.

You speak to her in quiet moments, and your words bounce back foreign. Her lips part and her responses reverberate in your head. Each morning you stand before the mirror and watch as she dresses in your clothes, the nice ones in the back of closets that you’ve saved forever for a special occasion. You watch her craft herself with something you don’t understand. You can’t seem to mimic the way she moves like water flowing around stones. She smiles as if to invite you to step beyond the glass.

You place your hand against the cool surface and let your smudged handprint settle there as she matches your gesture. You’re palm to palm and the glass shivers between your touch. Your heartbeat matches hers, your pulse meets hers, and if you close your eyes you are mirrors together.

In the dark hours she steps outside the mirror. You share your meals with her and set your tiny coffee table for two. She laughs at your jokes and she joins you in bed. You feel her breath on your neck as you slip into sleep, and when you wake she knows your secrets. She’s coaxed them out of you, one by one, whispering them back from your dreams with the same delicate care she uses to handle her hairbrush. You notice that with each one she looks more disheveled.

Before the sun rises, in a civil sort of twilight, you watch drowsily as she emerges from your closet in a gown you’ve never seen before. She smiles lopsided as the light begins to filter in through the curtains like she’s just remembered a life you’ve forgotten, or maybe never lived at all.

You’re trapped in the mirror when it shatters at dawn-break.

The Ghost Kiss

There is a whispering in between your footsteps and the floorboards as you make your way through the hall. You sense a lover’s touch on your skin as you open the fridge for a glass of milk. There she is. You see yourself swallowed by the absence of light in her sockets. You wave both to her and yourself, and you wonder if your hands would look more worn than hers if you could see them. They’re cold and damp as they guide you to the old stained loveseat.

She moves closer, blending with the cushion and your shadow on the yellow fabric. Her lips are pale; you do not see them. You feel her in the air first, shivering, and she’s already halfway there. Her touch is so piercing you feel a fire lit somewhere in your stomach and it crawls its way up your throat. You lean in and breathe in the glass.

Her kiss seeps so deep into your bones that you’re sure no blanket or hearth could save you. All you have is your fire. Static moves down your spine and you contort to meet her shape, there is nothing soft about her subtlety. It’s something like liquid nitrogen falling around chocolate-dipped strawberries, freezing them into hearts. It’s something like not being able to pay the bill for that night, too elegant for both of you. It’s nothing like quiet cafés or split coffee. Her fingers trace your jawline as you tremble.

You lose yourself to this reality more real than a movie theatre and sharing popcorn with a stranger, more real than a carnival and a kiss atop a Ferris wheel. Her kiss deepens and she tastes like the droplets of water that gather on glass, like an iced cucumber drink with rose petals on top. It’s closer than a beach at sunset or the perfect park bench.

In the dim light of the living room, you find her nestled against you, and she’s the most undeniable feeling. You stand and move to the mirror and expect her to follow, but she remains there, still and limp. You touch your lips and they feel foreign, they crease like a petal curls; she’s sculpted herself into you.

You go to smooth your hair with a grace that seems almost like serenity, and put on the nicest clothes in the back of your closet. As you step into the hallway you feel her whisper warm your ear, you feel a hand-breeze brush your shoulder. You wear the weight of your affections and pull your lips upward.

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