MARCY RAE HENRY
polygraph of the amnesiac
i tell you there are 5 black doors in front of me
and i want to paint one red.
amnesia is typically violent.
non-penetrating business is common
and reasonably understood.
the brain suffers playback.
non-penetrating violent failure.
don’t scrimp recreating the crime
in the shittiest room of a motel 8.
cut her toenails a little too close.
the picture in the 4th hallway is of a real
king but the painting next to it is fake.
time starts behind every door.
light moves across walls, self-reflective.
a mosquito buzzes in F#.
confabulation takes over where heaven ends.
a lie disguised as déjà vu.
we are what fills in gaps in god’s memory.
the cafeteria line moves in a fugue state.
choose any soup, warm or cold.
desire, unlike color, is not remembered.
no chance of reoffending.
Marcy Rae Henry is a multidisciplinary artist, una Latina de Los Borderlands y parte de la LGBTQ comunidad. She studied stuff in Spain, India, Burma and Nepal, hitchhiked around France, Spain and Portugal and motorbiked through the Middle East. Her writing has received a Chicago Community Arts Assistance Grant, an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize nomination and first prize in Suburbia’s 2021 Novel Excerpt Contest. Her writing and visual art appear in The Columbia Review, carte blanche, Epiphany, The Southern Review, Cauldron Anthology and The Brooklyn Review, among others. DoubleCross Press will publish her chapbook ‘We Are Primary Colors’ sometime this year.