Scar 21 — Blackbird Archive

← v19n2, Fall 2020

The scar on my brow was a third eye

once, and I gave the stranger my wallet,

and he took with it my school ID.

Just why he cut me, I will never know.

I was such a tiny motherfucker

and a motherfucker’s precious stone,

and though the cut was just a minor then,

it ran into the cradle of my eye.

It will always be that small, this cut.

It will always flinch at the stiletto

click of branches broken in the wind.

When I open a lamp, I open a well.

When I close, it closes, and the well

of light, because it is abandoned, grows.

violence body memory

Bruce Bond

Bruce Bond is the author of three forthcoming books: Rise and Fall of the Lesser Sun Gods (Elixir Press), which won the 17th Annual Elixir Book Prize, Frankenstein’s Children (Lost Horse Press), and Dear Reader (Free Verse Editions). He is the author of eighteen published books including Sacrum (Four Way Books, 2017); Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997–2015 (Louisiana State University, 2017), which won the L.E. Phillabaum Poetry Award; Black Anthem (University of Tampa Press, 2016), which won the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry; Gold Bee (Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), which won the Helen C. Smith and Crab Orchard Awards; and Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (University of Michigan Press, 2015). He is Regents Professor of English at University of North Texas.