Trajectory to the Sun

Abstract

Trajectory to the Sun Joanne Dominique Dwyer (bio) Keywords Joanne Dominique Dwyer, poetry The last time a guillotine was used to separate a head from a body of a human was in France in 1977. His name was Hamida Djandoubi. I don’t feel one bit of sorrow for him — He had beaten and beaten and burned lit cigarettes into his ex-girlfriend’s breasts and vagina before strangling her. Is it possible the executed lose the rights to their body parts and become in-the-dark donors? Meaning, might someone today have the sicko’s heart inside them, keeping them alive and able to suck on Tic Tacs? For the heart sends more messages to the brain, than the brain sends to the heart. A one-sided relationship, like the inmate who writes his mother daily to report such things as: we had oatmeal today with little dried flecks of apple in it, and last night they gave us microwave popcorn at group therapy — the theme being did you ever go to camp as a child? But the mother writing back only sparingly — one birthday and one Christmas card each year. The French stopped executing people in 1981. I stopped visiting the lockdown memory care unit, where I read poems to those once on a trajectory to the sun, now vagrant, itinerant, hobo. Poems like Christina Rossetti’s that asks: Shall I meet other wayfarers at night? A poem with the near-obsolete word: hostler — that means a man who cares for horses, especially at an inn. And a woman in the memory unit, wearing a gray [End Page 489] sweatshirt with food stains on it, says My sister with seventeen fractures — and all the horses came and put their heads down close to her. At home we argue about whether or not to have an exterminator come and eradicate the spiders with poisons. Pleading for alternatives, I vacuum and broom away a myriad of webs; dust the windowsills with talc powder in the scent of citrus. And turn off the porch light. I am buzzed into the memory unit through the electronic security door, offering an option to Bingo and Judge Judy — bequeathing the sum of something fanatical and jeweled. The tongue of the new man is distended to many times its original size, as if a white-tailed antelope squirrel has been birthed inside his mouth. In an almost indecipherable language, he tells us his real home is on the Pine Ridge Reservation, where he rode grass-eating horses all day and everywhere. And the poem ends: But is there for the night a resting place? [End Page 490] Joanne Dominique Dwyer A former Anne Halley Poetry Prize winner, joanne dominique dwyer lives in northern New Mexico. A Rona Jaffe award recipient and graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA program for writers, Dwyer workswith the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project, bringing writing and poetry into assisted living facilities. She also works with teens through the Witter Bynner Foundation and is the author of the collection of poems Belle Laide. Copyright © 2015 The Massachusetts Review, Inc