Brian Henry

There are rooms that know you, rooms you know & can name, rooms that rise & stutter into view if you stare long enough. Rooms where nothing happened but in your head, where the world went on apart from you, you trying to rise to it. Rooms with walls of white blocks, one window, the only sound the bang bang banging of the headboard against the wall, your bed still. The room where the bed fell on you, the room where the hand going down was not your own, the groping tongue the proof. The room you talked your way out of, four men of monosyllables, thick arms & necks flushed pink, closing in, emptying the air between. The room where you were walked in on, the room where you were the walker, both times the last time in that room. The room with no door, a woman across the threshold, you crawling to her, over her to the bathroom to press your cheek against the white, your name an indictment among the stalls. The room the sun never touched, the sound of cars dropping you to sleep, your pupils large & hungry for light.

“Burnished,” when applied to limbs, refers you to furniture, or wood at least, a hint the skin has been burned beyond the human, & then beyond. Necessary for the removal of skin from a burnished limb is an implement sharper rather than duller, wieldy & willing to dig without displacement. The scrape of flint on a burnished limb —if you say “arm” you must mean it— resembles, no doubt, a chisel (of iron?) that furls what’s before it, away. The point of whatever has been lost between the stasis of the burnished limb & its movement away from the rest of what you have identified as skin, the skin of a burnished limb, is to bring to bear the thought of bone & how it relates or, better, responds to its covering uncurling from it flake by flake & amassing, forceless, on the floor, the floor you will describe as cement or concrete, at least rug- and wood-less, the wood being the skin of the burnished limb, until the skin is just another piece of your household furniture.