Kierstin Bridger
ROUGH RECORDER
Close your eyes, they said, picture yourself small. A smooth but marked limb appears. You set your fingers on the bruises of the child’s arm. Don’t worry it’s your body, the nesting doll of you, the smallest of you, you can remember. Do they play like notes on the instrument of skin and bone? Inhale deep, there’s cedar inside, near the center of hurt. Oh, hummingbird heart, the beat of your wings is so fast. Let’s slow it down-- a frame by frame replay-- perhaps the moment your eyes widened in fear then closed slowly into wince. This slow-motion recoil, this stop-time is a study of gesture. We are safe outside our body, so removed we’re cool to the touch. That’s why we can reach for the marks, fingers of feather light, and place the whorl of our printed fingertip on a map of an old melody. It is tinny and corroded. Do you remember that song? Listen hard, there is an accompaniment, a crackle and a buzz, sometimes it skips. It’s a rutted black licorice disk, hard and shiny. It is a hypnotic circle of phonograph whine. Lean-in to hear the strained breath, the reedy tune of our skeleton. Shhhhh, we’re recording. This memoir, noir, this is slow music.