Illustration
We speak continuously with a tremendous silence.
He tells me that words may wound but quiet kills.
There are miles & miles of crimes between our bodies.
I refuse to be a forensic psychologist at home.
I refuse to kiss him
like it is a chemical interrogation.
He snores next to me & my heart turns to a quivering fist
closing around a sleeping knife.
Blood sequenced both
dorsal and anterior.
We don’t bring work home so I won’t
tell him of how the cannibal I interviewed today
leaned into the cold steel tabletop
& told me that the most difficult part of dismembering
a human body is the joints. We are best held in
these hardened knots of bones. Arthritis runs in his family
& already his kneecaps have given up.
When midnight performs a bunraku against the prison’s
lit masonry, I catch a killdeer choking in a nest of thistles.
From death row, a letter –
Rage is how grief gives itself a body.
Adam James Dano is from a small country town in Washington State
called Moses Lake. He began painting and drawing at an early age with
the help of his mother who doodled for him as a toddler. Adam now
lives in Long Beach, California where he paints and is a husband and
a father of two.
Scherezade Siobhan is a psychologist, w ɥѕȁ