Y’all seem to really be enjoying the poems I’ve been bringing you for National Poetry Month, so I thought I’d bring you this one. I worked with Malachi for awhile, and I didn’t know he was a Big Deal Poet, just that he was a sweet, gentle smoker prone to making excited, declarative statements in blooming prose and that he taught the kids things about dystopian futures. Enjoy this, his work.
This Gentle Surgery
by Malachi Black
Once more the bright blade of a morning breeze
glides almost too easily through me,
and from the scuffle I’ve been sutured to
some flap of me is freed: I am severed
like a simile: an honest tenor
trembling toward the vehicle I mean
to be: a blackbird licking half notes
from the muscled, sap-damp branches
of the sugar maple tree . . . though I am still
a part of any part of every particle
of me, though I’ll be softly reconstructed
by the white gloves of metonymy,
I grieve: there is no feeling in a cut
that doesn’t heal a bit too much.
