Angel Uriel Perales' poem "Aphantasia Child"

Bio: Angel Uriel Perales is a writer whose biographical details are not important.  Please enjoy his poetry.

She covers her eyes with her hands,

tells me I can’t see her.

I ask her how that works

and she simply giggles.

Her laugh, her armamentum,

I’m infected with memories agon,

her birth,

her first smirk,

some early sickness on her breath,

her smile dissolves in front of me in clouds

of white eiderdown and she giggles

and I learn how her trick works.

Reading time,

I read her favored books aloud.

She wants surplus depictions of the narratives,

my own distinctive portraitures.

She demands personal anecdotes.

I share what mental imagery I can

and she opens up to me her mind’s eye.

I feel quite contrived.

I found her hiding in a cupboard.

I laughed and asked her how she fit.

She gifted her quick smirk, 

my little Laverna with cunning teeth.

But thereupon I found the mustard on the counter,

a pickle jar, the Miracle Whip.

I swung open the refrigerator door,

my fury frightening me.

I castigated her with the dehortations of my youth,

the dangers of suffocation trapped inside

abandoned freezers abandoned in a field.

Annoyed, she closed the refrigerator door.

She opened the door again, annoyed,

and told me I possessed no imagination.

The pitfalls of the past are mild compared

to the perils of the present.

My little Discordia with diamond cutting teeth,

she told me she would hide one day 

and I would never find her again.

Oh aphantasia child,

where did you attempt to hide?

Where could you hide

when the gun barricaded your classroom?

When the tessellation of those hectoring bullets

shattered the bright mosaic of your short life,

did you cover your eyes with your trembling hands

wishing the gun would never find you?

I felt something shut off then heard interminable static.

The sun seared the printed words out of all reports,

the newspapers, the transcripts of the courts.

All faces sundered.

All the anchors on TV and all of the priests

melted and sundered.

All of our photographs,

her birth, her first smirk,

her last photograph establishing her death

with a smock covering her chest,

I saw nothing.

I saw all her pictures bathed in red.

I saw stoic purple.  I beheld vapid pain.

The propitiations of my left hand failed,

of either hand,

neither hand works.

The wine no longer pours.

Oh Father, you have no modern day imagination.

The pall of pain, the persistence of my memory,

I lack libations

and I wonder, for the first time,

how many times these children’s body bags,

hewn by Hercules,

will be reused.

©  2022 Angel Uriel Perales