two poems

Ars Poetica

He gave me a book and I opened it. The first line I noticed was, “The child with the blank face of an egg.” Then, I felt my face erased to its skull.

There was a missing space. So I peeled off a piece of a letter from the next page. And I nudged it carefully between the i and j.

She said, “How does it feel to have your head stuck in a zero?” Silence in a moment is imagination and I replied, “It is my halo.”

I erased a zero and it appeared in someone else’s thoughts. The sum of a zero and zero is zero. I wrote it again; this time it made sense.

He said, “We raise it to the lips of the nearest ear.” So I began to open books, listen for ink boiling, the scent of words; coffee brewing in my ear.

I watched the clock as if reading a sentence. The numbers were letters. The short hand was a subject, the long hand, a predicate, and the seconds, a verb.

We both stared at the ceiling. I said, “My eyes feel as if their inside cups.” Then she said, “Shall I pour your eyes back into your ears?”

I heard a circle as if it were a clock. It did not tick; instead, made the sound of an insect: it was a number in the shape of a cricket.

Language structures what we see without saying it. But I began to pull bones from sentences, and rearrange letters into skeletons.

I opened an envelope addressed to me. I pulled out a blank sheet of paper, unfolded it. In the letter: no message, no sender’s name, just a white space.

“I like that you exist,” she said. Like the lowercase i, my body felt present on a page: fitted in a dark suit, white necktie, and inside the black dot, a smile.

But it was the way her skin felt as she dressed into a black outfit. The way her body slipped into a long dark dress shaped like a shadow.

He picked up a stone; held it to his ear. Shook it like a broken watch. He opened it, and inside were small gears, shaped like a clock.

I am a skeleton. I am a sentence, too. Although like you, I am neither a meaning nor a structure, just a silence in a complete thought.

Bone milk

Write the O.

Dip skull

into bleach.

Press the letter.

Bones soften

into calcium.

Smear a zero.

Hair dissolves

into ink.

Erase paper.

Skin evaporates

into foam.

Boil subject

and verb;

condense

into liquid.

Fade from dark,

the shade of milk.
Suck out period.

Tooth heats

into fluid.

Now pour skeleton

into another skin.

Orlando White, is Diné (Navajo) from Sweetwater, Arizona. His clans are of the Zuni Water Edge People and born for the Mexican Clan. He is currently a creative writing student and holds an A. A. degree from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM. He is the co-senior editor of Bone Light, a journal of Neo-Modern Literature and a Zora Neale Hurston recipient at Naropa Institute. His poems have previously appeared in Ploughshares, 26, and are forthcoming in Ur Vox.