Michael Bassett
-First Place PoemThe Blackboard of His Eyelid If he had Becky Wilson here, he'd make her confess that she had lied about how his parents make him drink from the toilet and sleep in a rabbit cage. A pale and skinny clump of literature, always out past the curfew of acceptance, behind enemy lines of imagination, he plays torturer of the inquisition, brandishing the garden shears. On the playground, while he practices impossible contortions of introspection, they bloody his nose, hating the secrets hidden in the scriptorium of his oddness. They crack his sharp ribs, desperate for the futures he reads on the blackboard of his eyelid. T hey shake from his green satchel two dung beetles, most of a Mabel Garden Spider, a scab from his skinned knee, a sliver of bailing wire, a eat's eye marble, and a quart of Quick Start lighter fluid. He's a Chihuahua-eyed chicken boy with hundreds of freckles his mother swears are seeds from the pumpkin they carved him out of. But he knows where babies come from. He knows the darkness of the closet, where he listens to his mother's crying. He learns, under the henhouse, the weasel's way.
Summer 2005
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