Unit 6: Selection Vocabulary 1

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind.

Nor is my invisibility exactly a matter of a bio-chemical accident to my epidermis.

He was a tall blond man, and as my face came close to his he looked insolently out of his blue eyes and cursed me, his breath hot in my face as he struggled.

But he continued to curse and struggle, and I butted him again and again until he went down heavily, on his knees, profusely bleeding.

I gave up all that, along with my apartment, and my old way of life: That way based upon the fallacious assumption that I, like other men, was visible.

They were rangy, alert, and bounced up and down on their cushioned paws like wolves.

“Ma Frere, listen,” threatened Harmony amiably, “those two white people in the car came to get him for the welfare. They got papers on your nephew that give them the right to take him.”

He took the eye from his breast pocket delicately, and as he popped it into his face the social worker’s mouth fell open in a consternated O.

Each read the face of the other as if deciphering letters carved into softly eroding veins of stone.

She saw the black veins in the wings of the butterfly, roads burnt into a map, and then she was located somewhere in the net of veins and sinew that was the tragic complexity of the world so she did not see Officer Brackett and Vicki Koob rushing toward her, but felt them instead like flies caught in the same web, rocking it.

Breathe deep even if it means you wrinkle
your nose from the fake-lemon antiseptic

of the mopped floors and wiped-down doorknobs.

Your teacher means well,
even if he butchers your name like

he has a bloody sausage casing stuck
between his teeth, handprints

on his white, sloppy apron.

And when
all those necks start to crane, try not to forget

someone once lathered their bodies, once patted them
dry with a fluffy towel after a bath, set out their clothes

for the first day of school.

And when
all those necks start to crane, try not to forget

someone once lathered their bodies, once patted them
dry with a fluffy towel after a bath, set out their clothes

for the first day of school.