Prompt Night #1 “I may think of you softly from time to time. But I’ll cut off my hand before I ever reach for you again.” -Arthur Miller (The Crucible) (January 2025)

 

“I may think of you softly from time to time. But I’ll cut off my hand before I ever reach for you again.” 

I find myself catching a whiff of the textbook definition of longing 

Nostalgia for what it felt like to be filleted like a carp

You, like the hungry fishermen, with feet in the sand, who feast where they kill

Don’t shit where you eat

You always have.

pardon my french.

Shame, humiliation like an old pillory, 

the rigid and aged wood expelling a bracelet of splinters upon each wrist

A lasting memento of your words, 

you’d sooner sew your lips and preach to no one but Harpocrates 

The backroads I took to receive you, the bumper that thuds on the pavement from behind me

“I may think of you softly from time to time. But I’ll cut off my hand before I ever reach for you again.” 

I’ll use my godamn teeth if I must 

I’d start with my nails, easy work, like taking the tail off a shrimp, ridding myself of you like plucking off a leech

Then move on to the fingers, easy to crack, nimble thin rods, like uncooked pasta 

Till I get to the wrist then the hand, hacking away with my teeth like a sloppy turkey leg

I’d slaughter myself viciously, lap up the blood, and mutilate my own palm 

As my final supper, 

if I knew that I’d never reach for you again

“I may think of you softly from time to time. But I’ll cut off my hand before I ever reach for you again.”