Luci Arbus-Scandiffio

BOOK OF ZIPPERS

When I was a child
I was always touching something
the crease in the wall
the crease in the man’s face
a button to the umbrella
which I broke by pressing
thirty times in a single day.
Allegedly, I was unintelligible—
like a foghorn I bleated
and filled my chest with air.
I lived like a raisin
stuck in someone else’s pocket—
was happiest in winter
til my birthmark turned red.
Blood red! And slightly blue
on the edge. In the children’s wing
they froze it off—I slept like a number
between 1 and 10. The girl next to me
was getting her ulna reset.
She was hidden by geraniums
which were planted between our beds.
I assumed “reset” was a button
the nurse would press—
the sound was like a scissor
slicing open a vinyl chair.
Then I felt my own arm unzipping,
the butterfly escaping,
a hundred white stars falling out.

LUCI ARBUS-SCANDIFFIO is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers at UT-Austin. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best New Poets, Greensboro Review, Columbia Journal, and Denver Quarterly. She has two lesbian moms and is originally from New Jersey.