Josiah Bancroft // Poetry

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Blindfold Mask

No, she says, it’s the same.  It’s the same. 

I want to, let’s try again.

My wife gives me the slim black mask,  

says, put it on. Try again,

differently.   

The mask is no good, goes only over 

the eyes, disguising the brow, the bridge, 

the sockets.  Who forgets a whole person 

with only a sliver of face blacked out? 

Censors?  Nudes?  I put it on, burst into 

the room, hook her by the hips, stubborn 

as a new hinge, as hard.  She settles,  

pretzels her legs, makes an X with her arms  

like I’m made out of myth. Then an eyehole 

drops down, cuts her in half. It’s magic. 

I drag my arm across the bureau top,  

knock off a blue-hair in a jingle-bell frame,  

a girl in a swimsuit, a bride, a groom, 

their faces set, foreheads touching like 

bighorns. I throw a rattling seashell lamp 

through a mirror, scream where’s the money? 

Where’s the money, bitch? I don’t know 

where to start, she’s in such small pieces. 

It’s the same, she says, it’s still the same. 

Only worse now, because 

you’re a terrible hero.  A hero? I say.   

I was a bandit. I take off 

the mask.  It looks like a popped snake. 

I thought I was a bandit. 

You do it wrong, she says. Give it to me. 

She puts the mask on. 

I must have fallen on the floor. A six foot tall 

stranger stands over me.  

His eyes hide in his mask like jewelry in a drain. 

He is familiar, picking up 

the frames, my grandmother, the Shore when 

I was stung on the foot by  

a dead moon jellyfish, and Mama showed me  

how to pee down my leg, 

hiding behind her out in the middle of everything. 

He kneels over me, pets out 

my hair. His breath smells like pennies.  Tickling 

up my skirt, he climbs over me 

like the streetlamp that stared into my old bedroom, 

the light’s body winnowed 

into tiger stripes, the stripes eating the monsters I made  

in bed and then slung out 

into the world. Inside me, he is a thousand pounds 

of scaffolding. His voice, deepened 

by the quiet, whispers like traffic through a wall, 

Where’s the gold? he says.  

Tell me where the gold is, over and over. 

Josiah Bancroft’s work has appeared in Passages North, ReDivider, The Roanoke Review, The Hollins Critic, New South, and Makeout Creek,among others. He currently resides in Maryland on the Chesapeake Bay.

Date of Publication: 01 May 2008