Shifting, Remaining, Friend
Three poems by Rosed Serrano
Shifting
The face
with a crude vertical cut
through its bottom half.
Its thickest layer
pulled back,
peeled back,
curled back,
pinkish.
The nose held up
taut and defensive,
highly sensitive.
The mouth wide
and forgiving.
Exposing its insides —
soft and empty.
A distorted
vertical
cunning
smile.
Remaining
Arranged, I resembled a body:
the pelvic cavity used as an entrance,
hollowed, the shoulder bones as an anchor,
bent, the ribs a loom for fingers to weave.
Quick thrusts make the mattress react.
The bones lose shape and
crack under an excited fist.
After the fact, splitters of bones remain.
I hide among the threads of sheets.
Friend
I have an imaginary friend and with a knife he picks slowly at my arm — drawing small vertical lines that repeat and long horizontal ones that overlap. He doesn’t speak so I don’t know what he wants or how to tell him to stop. I tell myself he is drawing something that I eventually want to see. I talk to him about my day and he smiles. I don’t bleed. No one sees him and he becomes bigger in the dark. When I lie down, he likes to be on top of me, and it’s almost suffocating. When I talk about him, he just opens up my scar and I feel parts of me breaking or moving onto other parts of me. I want him to continue drawing because I can no longer use that arm. Sometimes when he draws and picks deeper wounds, I write. I write stories about a small town, one I will never know, and a woman who gardens and likes to watch things grow. Her family has all died and she lives with ghosts. She talks to them because, like her, they’ve been through life and death, and they go with her to the store when she needs more juice.
This work was one of two poetry winners in the Spring 2018 “Mind on the Page” contest, judged by Angela Flournoy, a lecturer in Creative Writing at Princeton and the author of National Book Award Finalist Turner House. Flournoy will speak on the work with its author, Rosed Serrano, at Nass Lit’s “The Mind on the Page” Conference on Saturday, April 21st 2018 at 6:15pm.
Rosed Serrano ’18 is a senior from the Bronx, New York studying African American Studies with a certificate in Creative Writing, Poetry. She enjoys yoga, watercolor painting and recently fell in love with drinking coffee. She bought her first coffee maker on a whim at the U-Store this past fall.
