From Year of the Rat

Abstract

from Year of the Rat* Marc Anthony Richardson (bio) Mare Fecunditatis Bodies, houses of scars, the places we have been: one day, dear heart, as your mother had been, rather than on the other side of this drawing you are going to be on the other side of a cleansing, cast down by stroke or fall or diabetic coma and left helpless in the hell of my heart; it could happen tomorrow today or next year—twenty centuries from now when you are vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle;1 and what rough beast would you find at the foot of your bed, waiting to give you your due, waiting with two plastic basins of water, one being solely water while the other would have in it a sudarium soon to be sainted by blood lymph and thumbprint and the mark of some tallow soap, formed from the suet of a slaughterhouse. An acid bath. I would have a look like an ax and an unthinkable act already marshaling motives in the back of my mind, harboring a heart, and an angst wrenching away at the bones—and I will feel you I will ache you I will cry you, for when the falling leaf of a false belief is as crushing as an eyelash against the cheek, when your lips are closest to mine, asking for that final favor that release, I can't say what I would do: my conscience is a sentence. Ghettoes and slums are not the same: if everyone is ethnically alike they are ghettoes, if everyone is just basically poor they are slums; we are a ghetto in a slum, you and I, the Facility suits us, for these low-cost duplexes newly constructed of cardboard and kiddy glue is just another fenced-in slum with its false hopes and doors and walls so thin that you could hammer a nail through the cranium-buttressed wall of the apoplectic next door. Our duplex has one ground-floor apartment where a veteran invalid and his offspring reside and one upstairs apartment where we are, and since you cannot take steps everyday you sometimes plop your packaged mass down onto the bottom step and bracing yourself on the stair and banister above scoot and heave yourself up, whereas upon descending this system is reversed by bracing yourself on the stair and banister below, all the while breathing as though through a straw; it is not only an extraordinary physical feat but a mental one as well, for after two years of this, by the haul and dragging of your enormity, the center lips of these wooden steps have adopted the polished appearance of mahogany, [End Page 44] for only upstairs apartments were available at the time of your move and since then no one in a downstairs apartment has ever had the pleasure of moving or passing away. Despite my forewarning from out west you rented it, because the third sister is only a half a block away and because of the low-cost living, only to find yourself sliding down or crawling up the steps like a bitch with a broken back, because despite accommodating advances, unless you are a complete cripple, Medicare doesn't care for a chairlift. There are six duplexes in a row and six more across a dividing walk, twelve in a section with three sections altogether and we are either black or brown or red inside of this fenced-in slum, inside of these side-by-side shoeboxes double-stacked that you can't help forever feeling like the recently procured pet respiring through pencil-punched-out holes, not to mention the outer claustrophobia of the ghetto encroaching you. After returning home I had first acquired an apartment in the Italian Market, but had to forfeit it for sake of the Academy and materials. I had refused the bedroom (your request) which of course has a door (you felt it more important for me to have a door), The room's more darker, you said, you can think; however my studio and living quarters became the fourteen-foot-square living room and the bed became the cot mattress on...