Rehab Rosetta Stone
Re-
(prefix)
i call myself a name in the mirror
again
again
word on loan
radiant ray’s repo man
keeps bringing me back here
to the bathroom sink
washing my mouth out
to sing a diatonic drop
of golden sun
never reaching mi,
a name i call myself in the mirror
again
again
Build
(verb)
when we walked before day-break
men in the garden grew a skeleton
that looked like a hut,
brick-layer skin made
from adobe mud cast from ground’s dust
baked by builder-chefs, culinary sun.
we were enslaved to construct
pyramids over lunch
out of grains and fruit.
men cooking the hut
ate, too (as proof, i once watched
one eat a whole lemon bar)
went home after heat-waves
preheated afternoons.
we went to rooms like refrigerators.
i wondered why they went home
when they were done building
never considering
that i lacked the strength
to build a hut,
or eat a whole lemon bar.
Make
– after Edward Elric
(verb)
gods buy humans
at the grocery store:
one kilogram phosphorous
two kilograms lime
three grams silicon
five grams iron
four liters ammonia
eight grams fluorine
twenty kilograms carbon
trace amount bromine
thirty-five liters water
one quarter kilogram salt,
eighty grams sulfur
pinch of cobalt
roll into a ball.
make oceans boil.
cook for one hundred years,
bury in the soil
Rebuild/Remake
(transitive verb)
i have learned these verbs
still i only see bones
in the sentences
when these doctors speak
words like scriptures
they think themselves gods
when they whisper
I will remake you
you will rebuild you.
Douglas Luman’s work has found forthcoming publication through other journal outlets as well, including (forthcoming) the Toad Suck Review, uCity Review and Epigraph Magazine.
