Cutters

It was April who went suddenly urgent
to the garage to get the handsaw and began sawing
along her neck during the house party
when her parents were both out on their trucking routes
didn’t know everyone could see her
from the kitchen window
she showed me the scar, like an earring
dangling forever in the wrong direction of gravity
not in vacuity like Brittney’s burns holes: Ghost Rider, ballistic
after we hooked up once
taking a razor blade
off the little cluttered coke shrine   
and opening them all at once
like an arrow path through three brown apples
she went on
to become such an amazing
noise musician, surrounded by different drums
and machines and tattoos, living
in the desert with her dog
I’ve known so many girls who
compulsively pulled on everything
and only some would be cast into the fire
at the end of the day—that was the era.
Some would walk down the halls at school
running their hands across the cement
to own punishment—a little girl with the top of a soup can,
Joseph’s red fingernail like a ruby
in the black folds of his clothes
making out scar pentacles—

Remember all those breasts in the night
like wounded vets
who insist on being left alone
with their disfigurements—and even
the palms of the hands, like a passed over Christ,
just injured enough—wrist, stomach, feet.
Only last week they took the blue Swiss Army Knife I’ve had since I was 12
that I now use for cheese and tags on clothes—took
from my makeup bag at airport security—forgetting it was there
I watched it go
“Willingly surrendered,” I agreed to call it.

Bianca Stone is a poet and visual artist. Her books include  Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Tin House & Octopus Books 2014), and The Mobius Strip Club of Grief (Tin House, 2018). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, jubilat and Poetry Magazine.  Her newest collection is “A Little Called Pauline,” a children’s book of the Gertrude Stein poem (Penny Candy Books, April 2020). She lives in Vermont.