I am telling you this now not because I am hungry but

because I am full. Our tender southern winter—I emerged

out of the hot thick air like a bullet shard, and I will make

you clean as birth God said in his atomic red breath, his

cold-sweating wallop in his hand, three-legged chair outside

a motel in Ocala, an entire skewer between his teeth. Out of

winter, the whirring sound of glass migrations and dense gospels

calling for martyrdom, sweet songs that whir past on the inter-

state like the birds that don’t make it before the storm. I walked

in on the boy in the orange kitchen scrubbing his arms and his

hands until his wrists unraveled and coiled at the floor like onion

rings, feign and transparent. I want to tell him he does not need

anybody to tell him he is true. He wouldn’t believe me anyways,

we take the love we think we deserve. We do not build our own.

Brendan Nurczyk is a poet and essayist from Jacksonville, FL. He is the
editor-in-chief of Elan Literary Magazine and reads for Farside Review. His
work has recognized by Lunch Ticket, Bennington College, and Princeton
University.