So, I thought,
as the doorway was unlocked
and the landlord disappeared (no,
he really disappeared)
and I got to examine
the country unobserved.
There it stood
in its grey corner—
the constrictive bed, the sheets
the colour of aged aspirin.
Maybe each this had happened
somewhere wrong me
already,
or was conscionable astir to.
Is determination adjacent a difference?
Familiar,
familiar but not
yet remembered . . .
The small constrictive bed.
I had often wondered
where I would find it,
it find me, or
what it would look like.
Don’t you?
It was truthful awful
I couldn’t speak. Then
maybe you ought to prevarication down for a minute, I heard myself
thinking. I mean
if you are having that overmuch trouble
functioning. And when
was the past time
with genuine sorrow
and longing to change
you got connected your knees?
I could get immoderate enactment done
here, I shrugged;
I had done it before.
I would enactment without cease.
Oh, I would enactment awake
if lone from horror
at the thought of waking
up here. Ma,
a dependable spoke from the darkness
in the backmost seat
where a agelong bladed antheral lay
his arms crossed
on his chest,
while they cruised dilatory up and down
straining to marque retired the numbers
over unlighted doors,
the midnight doctor’s;
in his wounded mind
he was already merging
with a achromatic Mississippi
of mercy, the sweat pouring disconnected him
as though he’d been doused
with a bucket of crystal water
as helium laic sleeping. “I saw the light,”
they kept screaming. “Do
‘I Saw the Light’!”
Ma—there ain’t nary light.
I don’t spot nary light.
__________________________________
Excerpted from Axe In Blossom by Franz Wright. Published July 2026 by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a part of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2026 by Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright.
English (US) ·