Roy White
THE DAMAGE IS THE TRUTH

Ice on the stairs, brief flight,
pain and an impossible angle.
A minute’s blindness, preview
of coming subtractions, then
pins and wire, a ropy scar.
My arm waves a credible
good-bye, but will never
be straight again.

Sometimes the abductees report
probes, even operations.
Sometimes there is damage,
a bit of the patient
misplaced or misconnected.

In this year of entropy,
when the Festiva’s snapped axle
sends it on a final charge
into a merciful snowbank, when
Lobster dies  and we can’t bear
to hear “Tiny Dancer,” we are
the egg that can’t be unscrambled.

Always there is pain,
but we are not resentful.
It’s flattering, in a way,
it shows they care, even if
mistakes are made.
The caves of Dulce feel empty now,
now that they’re gone,
some dead, some flown away.

My dogleg of an arm’s a fitting
emblem for us who make
a knight’s move, never a rook’s.
Alice’s friend could not
stay on his horse, but had the trick
of falling off with conviction.

Roy White is a blind person who lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota with a lovely human and an affable lab mix. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, BOAAT Journal, Kenyon Review, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere, and he reads poetry for the Adroit Journal. Roy can be found on Twitter at @surrealroy.

Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #25.