Dear, Sincerely (Pitt Poetry Series)

by David Hernandez (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2016

  $20.23

  Dear Proofreader
  
  You're right. I meant midst, not mist.
  I don't know what I was stinking,
  I mean thinking, soap speaks intimately
  to my skin every day. Most days.
  Depending if darkness has risen
  to my skull like smoke up a chimney floe.
  Flue. Then no stepping nude
  into the shower, no mist turning
  the bathroom mirror into frosted glass
  where my face would float
  coldly in the oval. Picture a caveman
  encased in ice. Good. I like how
  your mind works, how your eyes
  inside your mind works, and your actual eyes
  reading this, their icy precision, nothing
  slips by them. Even now I can feel you
  hovering silently above these lines,
  hawkish, Godlike, each period
  a lone figure kneeling in the snow.
  That's too solemn. I would like to send
  search parties and rescue choppers
  to every period ever printed.
  I would like to apologize to my wife
  for not showering on Monday and Tuesday.
  I was stinking. I was simultaneously
  numb and needled with anxiety,
  in the midst of a depressive episode.
  Although mist would work too,
  metaphorically speaking, in the mist of,
  in the fog of, this gray haze that followed me
  relentlessly from room to room
  until every red bell inside my head
  was wrong. Rung.