Man Hole

The boy must have done it late at night,
fuck-you-body-slam against the wall,
or hurled baseball trophy, impaled broom,
perhaps that old cliché, the fist—
in time for breakfast there it was—
emblem of some rage or hurt,
some disgrace, heartache even, mine, too, tacit,
shrugged off by his father: Typical, he said.

For months, then the better part of that year,
it gaped raw and torn. Every day coming down
to eat or leave, there, at the foot of the stairs
an unhealing venous ulcer, it was something
to ignore though impossible.

In the first days of January,
at Home Depot for rock salt,
I was the one who found a man and asked
what we needed. Nonplussed,
he took us to aisle 14.
I raised boys myself, he said.

At home, his father cut a clean square from the drywall with a razor,
removing the blasted center, and the boy
flattened the mesh panel with the expanse of his hand
but both lost interest after the first layer
or so of slathering joint compound
and so it became mine to fix.
Six layers for the hole to close,
six layers of my smoothing it on
like icing a cake before writing someone’s name,
then sanding with the finest paper I could find,
then waiting for the surface to dry completely
before starting it all again, and finally
painting the wall a new color, some deep
deep blue I liked: Ravine, Sanctuary, Adriatic.
I can’t recall. They don’t make it anymore.

In the right light I can see the apparition
of the patch beneath the paint, its lattice softly ridged.
No one seems to notice it but me—still,
I might have been more patient.

Ann Lightcap Bruno teaches English at the Wheeler School in Providence and lives in nearby Cranston, Rhode Island, with her family. Her essays and stories have appeared in such publications as Word Riot, Barrelhouse, Sweet, Painted Bride Quarterly, Vestal Review, Alimentum, and Talking Writing.

The genre2 interview

What is your preferred genre and why?

While I love writing personal essays, my preferred genre is fiction. I appreciate the ways in which fiction writing offers opportunities to dig into the things that happen to us and the things that we witness in real life, and also to reinvent these same things. The invention part can be both freeing and terrifying, but ultimately, I enjoy the challenge of trying to make a character and situation that other people will care about. I tell my students that the point of reading fiction is to better understand the human experience, and I think the same can be said about writing it.

Why did this piece compel you to move to this alternative genre?

This poem came about after listening to the amazing Honor Moore read passages from CP Cavafy and talk about the idea of "dwellings." I had wanted for some time to write about the image of the hole in the wall but hadn't found the right way into it. Because writing this as a poem caused me to think differently—in terms of lines and rhythm and economical language—I somehow found it easier to approach the subject.

What challenges or surprises did you encounter while working in this genre?

As someone who doesn't think of herself as a poet (though I teach poetry and read a decent amount of it), I tend to be intimidated by the prospect of creating purposeful line breaks that don't seem too affected. I also wanted to create a sense of narrative distance between the speaker and the other two main characters in the poem, but I realized that in my earlier drafts, some aspects of plot weren't clear to an outside reader. Lately, I have been experimenting with poetry a little more, making myself write alongside my students when I give them prompts in class. It's good to stretch ourselves as writers, to shake up our tendencies and habits. Writing the occasional poem sometimes allows me to return to some piece of prose with a looser grip on the pen, to riff more lyrically, and also to be more attentive to words.