I remember you had a mulchy beard and a yellow
square right here on your neck where the skin
was grafted from some other part of the body.
I imagined it had come from the small of your back.
I remember thinking, Is that back-skin? and later,
at the hot springs, stealing glances at the hairy strip
along your spine, searching for the missing piece.
I never asked about it, but we all knew what it meant.
There were twelve of us in the staff house that season and
we checked our stories at the door. Too loud for questions.
Too many childhoods to keep straight. For all I knew
the transplant wasn’t even yours, for all I knew you had
some happy butcher in your life, some blameless Abel
willing to deliver you a cut of flesh.
I guess the word is broey, though it seems somehow
beneath you now, an insult to memory. Already I’m
re-writing you, sanding down the edges. Coffee breath.
The clumpy hairs you left in my electric razor.
I didn’t even know you, Jeff. We used to hang out
on the second-floor balcony and smoke Spirits.
I had this gold lighter I gave you that you told me
changed the fucking game. I wasn’t really a smoker but
I liked to watch you do it. The ripple in your throat.
I stood downwind of you to get a better look at it.
The people always going on about their inner
transformations are the ones who never change.
You flicked the lighter open, shut. The ripple in
the flame you carried with you. Damn, you said,
there’s just something about a fire.
Jeremiah David is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He lives in the Midwest, where he teaches English at a private liberal arts college. His poetry, interviews, essays, reporting and photography have appeared in Salon, Camas, Fifty Grande Magazine, The Palisades Review, New Moon Magazine, Grey Sparrow Press, Badlands Literary Journal, Sunset Liminal, and Where Y’at Magazine. jeremiahdavid.com