Three Types Of Closure, Or Love Lessons From The Wound Ward
Primary Intention
Blood-clean, milk-clean: the stab and slide of first love, and a cut that closes before you know it gaped. Your thin skin is no barrier to the clean seaming, the simple press of lips that vanishes with time into a shining silver line.
Secondary Intention
An evolved accident, as inevitable as a platypus, or your unending hunger to cleave to the lover who keeps you sleeping on his floor, too fat for his bed. Smelling the dust of orange shag carpet against your cheek, you tell yourself many gashes close from the outside in, skin healing before the flesh.
Third Intention
You’re left open on purpose, with cold wind singing, seeming endless, over the tender hole. Deep and shock- purple, your wound is kept exposed. Anyone who looks is invited to this marriage, of the formerly subcutaneous to air. You can’t touch, but you must carry this absence, feel your heart beat in its pit, present it again and again to inspect. It feels like all you have for anyone, and opposite of a gift.
Lisa Schapiro Flynn has poems published in journals including The Tishman Review, Radar Poetry, Bluestem, The Crab Creek Review, Pretty Owl Poetry, 13th Moon: a Feminist Literary Magazine, and others. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2019 and 2020, and received the Honorable Mention for the 2018 Crab Creek Review Poetry Prize. Lisa has studied at Bread Loaf, VQR, Eckerd College, and Poets House. She has an MFA in poetry from Emerson College. Lisa lives in the far suburbs of New York City with her family.