the columbia review
fall 2020
THE TRUTH OF THE THING Justin Phillip Reed
I love you. You floor me. I have loved you and been floored. I fell for you. I hit the floor. I’m in love and on the floor. Blood continues hitting the tiles. It glides over grout. It slides out a mouth that I made in my head, having loved you in a way hardly regular. It is as red as a convertible, Christ’s robe at supper. I don’t know why I think love looks like somebody on a floor, or a dinner table broken in two, or a fist where fits the handle of a pistol I haven’t yet faced in person, though I know a man who loves me has for me one or the other. Yes, I’m thinking of my brother, whom I’ve bled—what he owes me. I always got my ass whooped in bathrooms. You remind me of him, and quietly I like it. One of you will destroy me. Anonymous gospel will open in the shape of a horn in an off-camera corner of the room. Open as the mouth on the floor, blood thick from a spigot. Spill of magnesia milk. Thick wad of wasp larvae, the spider’s open abdomen. Red as the bone of an aesthete. I love you to the floor.
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