Indirective

Indirective Rob Colgate (bio) After Frost, 1946 My wholeness is contingent on confusion.In this way I am like water. The humors of my bodymust occupy their broken vessel. Beyond a broken vessel is blood and its contusion. Next to my contusionis a series of thin white scars against the vast darknessof my forearm, for my arm is contingent on a past that cannot be saved. I drink again as I am told. I was toldby the doctor not to drink for the serum in my blood.But I have channeled that medicine into my phlegm. So I drink for play. I play with a boy in a brookof alcohol, let it run through me like a house.How the boy moves into me, belilacs me like a cellar. Yet cells of my brain keep blinking out.The force of cough sends fluid of my spinedribbling down my lips. I am sick. This is evident. An evincible imbalance of biles.Imbalance suggesting dizziness.Dizziness suggesting confusion. The brook boy is beyond confused, moves beyondour union. A cold sensation with no name rages.I name it delusion. This compels me to break another vessel. [End Page 146] This propels a shard of glass. This compels a bruise.This impels a railroad spike directly through my skull.I do not bleed but I do gush, the bile rushing by. I think confusion often falls for me between the selfand the other, the order and the disorder.Can I talk to you about it? Now that the boy is gone. I direct the good-self. Every standard cell as a watering place.The neural spring of sodium, calcium surging in lofty pumps.Biological belonging even amidst mass apoptosis. And then even pathogens exist beyond confusion.Just a bad-other, foreign groaner, your sad motherspooning you thin yogurt. The germ is not a part of you except for when it is. Good-other, microbiota, gut florablooming. In fact you are mostly foreigners.Look, how your body fluoresces, convinces itself of its own homeostasis, its own self-conscious cohesion,the thin lining of your stomach sieving the waters.But back to the rod through my head. What breaks me like a chalice is the bad-self.My sister recalls when that thing was trying to kill youas if madness is a virus. But confusion is a part of me, the contingency for my wholeness. Perhaps likean autoimmune disorder. Self mistaking self for enemyand attacking. Psoriasis. Eczema. The itchy schizy feeling. But no, too direct. Maybe madness is a cancer.Self mistaking bad-self for good-self, cheering itself on,keep going, keep growing, turn this former town [End Page 147] into a playhouse of unnecessary cells. Tumorigenic psychosis,you are a part of me, a swath of grey against my pink insides,pouring out with humor from the gauges of my trepanated head. And look, how a boy cannot learn to loveevery part of himself, impartial to his wholeness,the confused contusions, deluded detrusions. Now sleep. The self-multiplication continuesat its maddening pace, water forever streaming outof a cup that will not empty, from which no one will drink. [End Page 148] Rob Colgate Rob Colgate is a Filipino-American poet from Evanston, Illinois. He holds a degree in psychology from Yale University and an mfa in poetry from the New Writers Project at the University of Texas at Austin. A Pushcart Prize nominee, his work appears or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, Washington Square Review, Muzzle, the Margins, and Salt Hill, among others. He is the winner of the 2022 Andrew Julius Gutow Poetry Prize, selected by Oliver Baez Bendorf and sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. Currently, he is a Fulbright scholar conducting research and writing poetry at Toronto Metropolitan University's School of Disability Studies. Copyright © 2022 University of Nebraska Press

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