Mannequin Envy
a journal of visual and literary arts
~fall 2006 ~
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Donald Illich has published poetry in The Iowa Review,
Fourteen Hills, Pinyon, Hubbub, Roanoke Review, and New Zoo Poetry Review. His work will be included in future issues of Passages North, Nimrod, LIT, failbetter.com, and The Sulphur River Literary Review. He received a Prairie Schooner scholarship to the 2006 Nebraska Summer Writer’s Conference. www.floatnotswim.com Without Saying Anything At night I keep hoping you’ll say words, but I understand if your allergy to language keeps you down in the dumps of a garbage bin where I’ve been throwing out hand gestures for weeks, draining pus from ninety percent of my communication with the universe. And in the morning I open the container to see you typing out fingers on your hands, rolling your eyes at karate kicks I practice so no one can boss me around anymore. I tickle you beneath your gills. You bubble out soap to clean dirty phrases in my mouth. If I’m eating lunch and mention chicken salad, you flap your arms like you’re going to take off. If I’m slapping a butler for driving my Jaguar, you turn an imaginary wheel, screech to a stop. I can almost see your lips move then, telling me to stop, before your tongue’s forced to do things: lick the hairs on my stomach below my navel, wash my throat in dirty ways only you can imagine. |