print previewback torrin a. greathouse
My Friend Tells Me I’ve Got to Stop Letting My Enemies Live Rent Free in My Head
There’s a cyst sat on the surface of my brain shaped like a spider-
web. Sometimes, I wonder if you could trace it back to the water
-melon seeds I swallowed as a child. Or the water pipes & paint
that lined my childhood home. Maybe it was that when I told my
mother how I wanted to be as big & strong as my brother she
laughed, said I should try drinking Miracle Gro & was too drunk
to stop me when I did. Maybe it grew as if sown by my father’s
fist, or any other in a drawn-out history of wounds. Rotted fruit.
Red nest of creeping things. In the sky, crossing from one state
to another, the pressure grows so bright I think the cyst might
burst. In the eye beneath it, my sight goes gray, then red, then
dark. Then after touching down it returns, bit-by-bit, as if timid.
Afraid of what I contain. The doctors say that it’s not yet worth
an operation. The risk—too steep. The procedure: fenestration.
A window cut past bone, where infection could creep inside.
It’s funny, you know? Some doctors think you’re born with them
in there. I think someone snuck a monster into my head. I want it out. 
Note: This poem was written in an Oulipian form, the Fox’s Gambit, invented by Julian Randall and myself. It is a seventeen-line poem wherein every three lines, a letter of the alphabet is removed—either by a collaborating poet or via random generation—from the poet’s lexicon, restricting their access to language and requiring them to improvise their way through the compositional project. For example; this poem loses the letters J, L, V, G, and Z.
My Friend Tells Me I’ve Got to Stop Letting My Enemies Live Rent Free in My Head
Still Life of Central Valley with Fog Cannons