Wound from the Mouth of a Wound by torrin a. greathouse

Author:torrin a. greathouse
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: 2020-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Hapnophobia or the Fear of Being Touched

After learning that there are over one hundred thirty-two

distinct phobias & still no word for the fear of fishhooks,

I think of my father, his broad hand, unfurled over

my tiny fist, the knife he teaches me to clutch, its rough

handle of recycled bone suddenly gone

slick against my not-yet-calloused palm.

The way the ice box thumps like an unsteady

heart—like I imagine my grandfather’s did, that year

in the restaurant, breath snagged sharp in the back of his throat,

face blooded as dawn over his crucifix’s pale gold, & we waited

in shock for him to gasp back to his body’s surface.

Let me start again, my father dragged the panicked pulse,

a bluegill, out from the ice. Its mouth, like my grandfather’s,

a wordless babble. Both their eyes, flat & dull as a copper ashtray.

There is a word for the fear of water, but not of drowning. Another

for the fear of darkness, but not how it hides a person’s face.

Sometimes, I forget the difference between an eclipse & silhouette

—sorry, I’m losing the thread—I mean, my father made me hold

the knife. Showed me on the fish where to find an entrance

& make it open. Blade dragged from anus to throat. Its guts

a door kicked in. Its blood escaping like still-hot wind from a kitchen

in the winter where my father told me how, in high school, he wrote

a guide for field dressing humans, just for fun. Now, I imagine

every animal he pries open, guts steaming like spring dirt, could be

a child; the scar where I once opened, thin strip of sunset,

that still aches when a lover hooks their fingers to drag

an orgasm’s unsteady pulse from inside me, to leave me

gasping, eyes fish-wide & panicked. I mean, some days,

I still can’t look straight into the mirror surface of glass

or a fish’s eye & there is a name for both these fears.

Like, the fear of dead fish, Ichthyophobia, from the Greek

ichthys, meaning fish, but also the name which Christians used

to hide their faith when it was a hunted thing. Perhaps this makes my fear

a kind of prayer, how some mornings, I wake unable to move, a body

above me, eclipsing the light. Always with a man’s face.

& always a gold cross, glitter & flail, strung from his neck,

like a fish with punctured gills, open mouth futile

against the gilded line. Let me start again, once,

my father caught a fishhook through his palm, dipped his hand

into the river & his blood—his blood was touching everything.

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