☀ Today's Poem: "Autotomy" JP Grasser

If their tails really did grow back, we never saw,
having by then returned the skinks and racerunners

to their burrows and wind-furrowed dunes.
This was Nebraska, summertime, a whole world

removed from this less obvious one, field-pivots
orbiting nothing, clouds of gnats coalescing

into gaseous planets, hell, even the radio
was somehow plainer out there. At the top

of the hour, a gruff voice rattled through futures
and the price-per-bushel of soybeans, a voice

perfectly at ease with the sort of dull machinery
that swallows people whole—what I meant to

prove was a mind full of purpose and a head
for precision. So I caught the lizards and cut

their tails off with a hacksaw while my cousins
shrieked with glee. I'd read Lear, by then, which

was part of the problem, part of the part of myself
I was trying to lop off for good, that flamboyant

precocity, that taste for beauty in all its irrevocable
ache and complexity. As flies to wanton boys—

Would you believe I thought of the line as I held
a severed tail up to the light, inspecting the scales'

overlay, that impossible geometry? What matter
if you don't? That's the truth. Together, sometimes

we chased the girls with the bloody-limp tails,
but when I was alone, I sat by the bank and held

sun-hot stones to my chest and prayed to the god
of lucid skies who put calligraphy on the face

of the water, and below it, light that quakes and warps
in ribbons, who cast glittering archipelagos

across the marble floors of commerce, who mulled
the viscous light of winter afternoons, who even honed

the sliver of light that cut my grandmother in half,
her last morning. Her gray tongue flicked

at the ice chips and her mouth opened and closed
by reflex, and I will never forget it. What I wanted

was to be unformed, to be stripped naked and devolve
back, back to that time before my parts made me

un-whole, before death was withstood, let alone
taken lying down. Some days, I walked around

all afternoon with a cleft tail in my pocket, calling it
talisman, calling it clever fiction in the selfsame

breath. I knew myself a coward, but I thought
self-severance was a way of being brave and smart

at once, another genius trick of evolution. Turns out
they mostly die, and if they are made whole again,

their tails grow back discolored, stubby, and dull,
so they're outcasts anyway. Imbricated light of days,

I may many times have been an engine of cruelty,
but let them never say I was no student of the light.

I was. I apprenticed myself to the light and saw it
break on everything.