Aron Ralston once cut his own arm off after being wedged underneath
a boulder in a remote canyon for 127 hours.
Sometimes I find you downstairs in the kitchen, naked, staring
into the open window in the middle of the night,
your body gleaming like half of a blood orange.
The love we made on the day you came home from Iraq
was deafening; I could hear the thunderstorm of your heart
from a mile away. Every slide of my palm down your back
produced another peal of lightning.
I counted the intervals between thunderclaps.
One. Two. Three.
Fifty-nine.
You jump at the sound of slamming doors; you once patted down
your little brother when he woke you up at 3 am, singing,
trying to build bird nests in your spine.
There were no assault rifles hidden in his clammy five-year-old hands,
no bullets or AK-47’s, just the sweet sweat of his tiny body
as you muffled his shrill cries with your hand.
Some days you fuck harder than I’d like, until it becomes less
like a thunderstorm and more like a hurricane, until even
the backs of my knees grow sore. You want to fuck all this scared
right out of yourself.
And some days I wonder if maybe you’d forgotten a piece of yourself
back there, back in that small, dusty village in Iraq,
something that when fitted back onto your body would make
you whole again, something that can change everything,
like a phantom limb, like the sad, bloody arm
that Aron Ralston removed so many miles away in Utah,
the sound of his own beating heart
more terrifying than any gunshot.