Photosynthetic Self-Surgery
Waking is the anesthetic. Reach
in, remove one lung and the still-
beating heart. I’ll come back to you
later. Outside, three crows
pretend to sing, seated on a branch
that points both skyward and down.
Take tweezers, tug the splinter
in the bulb of an index finger.
Pull out a web of nerves, thin
electricity to set in a glass jar,
jittery cylindered filaments. Take
your time, slow your time.
These organs crawl to each
other like a plant to light
while you walk out of the house,
look for a replacement, the wings
of a pantomimed bird lifted by
a pulse, up and gone in between
the beats of a flickering street lamp.
Robert Krut is the author of four books: Watch Me Trick Ghosts (Codhill/SUNY Press, 2021); The Now Dark Sky, Setting Us All on Fire (Codhill/SUNY Press, 2019), winner of the Codhill Poetry Award; This is the Ocean (Bona Fide Books, 2013); and The Spider Sermons (BlazeVox, 2009). He teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Writing Program and College of Creative Studies, and lives in Los Angeles. More information can be found at www.robert-krut.com.
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