Self-Portrait With An Open Skull
How cold this room, how baby blue
the sheets as I shiver myself to sleep.
I want to remember
what it was like: face-down:
scalpels, forceps, hands
intruding on a dream,
saws, clamps, breaking in
to the bone white theatre.
A hole in me, how cold
the clamp, how taut the skin.
Sing, sing bone-saw, open
the passage my thoughts walk,
the frosted back-alleys
of the brain, the seedy
side-streets with plastic bag
tumbleweeds, an anesthesia dream.
Godly cinematographer,
get that dolly shot
in the subway, show a rat
trekking a slice of pizza down
the tracks. This is where
one goes when the lights go
out, when sterile gloves tread
deep in the soul, this is where
the metronome of the mind is.
Then a waking, soft and slow
like walking in the corridor
between two lives. The lights dim.
A projector flickers and I see how
the bone saw let the light pour in—
sawdust, stardust, thought rust.
I see the surgeon’s hands
and the paper moth
which he pulls from my skull.
This poem was originally published in Radar Magazine
Anthony Borruso is pursuing his Ph.D. in Creative
Writing at Florida State University where he is a Poetry Editor for
Southeast Review and co-host of the Jerome Stern Reading Series. He has
been a Pushcart Prize nominee and was selected as a finalist for Beloit
Poetry Journal’s Adrienne Rich Award by Natasha Trethewey. His poems
have been published or are forthcoming in The American Journal of
Poetry, Beloit Poetry Journal, Pleiades, Spillway, The Journal, THRUSH,
Gulf Coast, CutBank, Frontier, and elsewhere.
He can be reached at
Instagram handle is @borruso.ant and my Twitter is
@anthony_borruso