Disappearing Trick
When you are curved into yourself
a Moebius strip wrapped around
the missing-tooth ache of your heart
I am a fat drunk horsefly
clumsy legs skittering over
the smooth surface of your inside-out skin
the backs of your eyes.
You are gone. A little girl pulled down the drain
with the bathwater, the ducks and boats, the soap
and sun and stars drawn down the spiral
of water into the ringing pipes.
I am that ring of shaving scum
that never goes down.
Something small and venomous
climbing out of the drain.
Jacob Rakovan is an Appalachian writer in diaspora. He is a 2011 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Poetry and recipient of a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Rakovan was a finalist for the 2012 Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature and the Gell poetry prize, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Dzanc book’s Best of the Web. He is co-curator of the Poetry & Pie Night reading series in upstate New York, where he resides with his five children and a mermaid. His book of poems, The Devil’s Radio is forthcoming in Fall 2013 from Small Doggies Press. – source – The Nailed Magazine
