I

Intending to shave the upper part of his upper lip, Mark instead drags the razor across the inside of his nostril, slicing the thin layer of flesh stretched across the septum. Blood flows like water from an open faucet, most of it pooling up in the sink (appropriately enough). After recovering his bearings, he crumples up a piece of toilet paper and stuffs it into the wounded nostril to stanch the flow; there it stays during breakfast and while he dresses himself for the day. When he removes it, damp and the color of drool from the mouth of a halfwit sucking a strawberry candy, the bleeding has subsided but an angry red line is visible where the blade inflicted its damage, and each time he sniffles the upward current of air is like salt in the wound. 

You open your eyes but all you can see is a red line, like light but at a strange angle. It flickers as you blink. You’re not sure whether it’s outside or in your eyeballs. Your head lolls. Pain pierces through it. A rumbling noise. It’s too much. You bury yourself back into sleep. You wake again because your shoulder is jarring against something, try to shift an arm to steady yourself, but it won’t move. Your wrists are together, behind your back. Something cuts into them. You tense your neck to try to keep at least your head still. That faint line of red is definitely outside you, beyond your reach.

as Chelsea Manning. It’s

a passion play. Audiences 

unfamiliar with solitary confinement are

broken; during the Super Bowl ad 

My mother believes, I think,
in a cellular illuminati, one that plots my downfall
first by unrelated incidents (though the dry skin winks 
at the inflamed gum) and then one by one the organs
sink into sepsis—this is the only logical progression—

Out of the instability of waking,
the chaos of light and eyes,
sounds and breath,
comes the inevitability.