Reading Through Mimesis

“Simet sits beside Dan Hole. ‘Mr. Hole, you have the toughest job. You
are going to make certain that, for the first time in his life, Andy Mott
passes all his classes with a C.’”

“When grades come out, though Mott has threatened Dan’s life daily, we
have the second-highest cumulative grade-point average of any winter
athletic team and are all eligible.”

-Chris Crutcher, Whale Talk

The other boy is spitting expletives into your face

and they keep getting stuck under your eyelids
as they drip down your skin.
Your body,
a dictionary masquerading as a pile of gangly limbs,
slowly begins to absorb this new lexicon and weave it in
between all of your other entries.
A particularly deafening four-lettered interjection lands
squarely on your cheek
and cascades off your cheekbone, falls free
until it lodges itself between your ribs,
lands right between “waste” (noun)
and “hopeless” (adjective).

You suck in a patient breath as you reach

into your own chest cavity,
narrating your actions aloud as you move the entry
one letter at a time into a more appropriate position
up next to your Adam’s apple,
right above “determined” (adjective)
and just to the left of “grace” (noun).
Your narration does not reach his face
or stick under his eyelids,
and a quarter of an hour later he is still staring at your ribs
as though expecting to find a piece of himself there.

His masquerade,
substantially less lanky and exactly twenty-five percent more metallic than yours,
disguises a thundercloud, an impossibly angry rumble
hidden behind the thin mass of cotton clinging to his torso
and the usual pair of scuffed up Jordans
and those God (the most proper of nouns)
damn (interjection, one of your newly acquired entries)
headphones that you have already asked him at least five times
to please take off.

You have spent years

vaguely aware of the storm seeping out of him,
but have never before dared
to edge this close to the center of his hurricane,
close enough to see every single ice particle
crashing around his head,
the distinct currents of electricity
that spark at the nape of his neck and crackle
down his spine until they ignite his prothesis in a blaze of light,
a beacon of violence;
Close enough to see how the deluge of furious hail he leaves in his wake
has been shaped by monsters (noun)
and men (worse noun)
and men trying their best to become monsters (noun phrase, worst of all),
by fiendish figures sneaking into children’s rooms
and the painful stench of ammonia,
the painful textures of aluminum and rot,
the pain.

And behind the pain,

the most beautifully (adverb)
jarring (adjective)
kindness (undefinable)
you could ever articulate.

There is a carbon fiber fire in his eyes.

He is still staring at your ribs.
Look up, you do not say. Yet.