Spelling Bee
Nicky Beer

Angles have overtaken them:
tightly ratcheted hair ribbons,
hard-knobbed joints,
the perpendicularity of shoulders.
Then words
announced by the funereal cadence
of a detached voice.
Constellation. Mercurial. Infinitesimal.

The nearsighted boy saw a display of stuffed gophers
once in the museum,
and a puce, fissured brain in a jar.
Now he’s poking at his molars,
left, then right, then left again.
Consonants come first
out of the dark network
dug into his skull, then the vowels.

For the blonde girl, the letters surface
as white, bruised corpses
from the bottom of a brown river
which she grimly identifies:
the one with the tattoo on his neck,
the one missing the first joint
of his left ring finger,
the one who just had a birthday.

For the lisper, each word is a wobbling mobile
hung too high, and he pictures
a disembodied baby fist
uncurling to bat them
into readable revolutions.
In the silence between each syllable,
The cincture of his bladder tightens.
Spon-ta-ne-ous. Spontaneous.