Backstage is made better
by the lunch Miss Anaphora
packed for him A glowing
cylinder of mint jelly
and a knot of prawns
The other characters shoulder
past him in the wings
overheated in their itchy
chimera sweaters
Rehearsing their lines
in an ecstatic stutter
He despises their fake
delight over the ant farm
of cancer bequeathed
by Act Three
The way they make pets
of each other
between scenes
They think the audience
fantasizes about what
they do behind the scrim
But they don’t have a paper bag
of bedizened sea creatures
packed with
yummy unguent
They don’t have someone
who loves them when
they’re dormant
He knows he frightens
the others
with his sacred crustaceans
But he’s glad to remember
the dismemberment
favored by shamans
and salt eaters
Hence his favorite epithet
Those pretenders
with their amateur foods
Simeon Berry lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. He has been an Associate Editor for Ploughshares and received a Massachusetts Cultural Council Individual Artist Grant. His first book, Ampersand Revisited (Fence Books), won the 2013 National Poetry Series, and his second book, Monograph (University of Georgia Press), won the 2014 National Poetry Series.
These poems are from Nix, a book-length sequence I recently completed, which serves as the refracted biography of a doppelganger figure, a textual interloper drawn involuntarily into various genres and archetypes as he struggles with both narrative and gender instability. Other poems from the sequence can be found here, here, here, here, here and here
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