Long Division
Jeremy Gregersen

I start awake to a stranger’s hand
at my side. But it’s mine; yours

are with you across the bed. Arm numb,
my eyes shake open to the stale glare

of infomercial blue dividing the dark,
making the room seen and unseeable

in its shadows and solids. Glassesless,
I squint against the dichromic gloom:

And believe you me it’s the last knife you’ll ever need!

The television chef or host wields his wares,
cutting fuzzily through what I make out

to be tin cans, blocks of frozen spinach,
perhaps Barbie dolls or helicopter blades. I shake

my arm and wonder at the line of light
the knife is called on to produce,

the so-thin space where a thing, once whole,
defines itself in twain, and I,

I want him to cut more, to divide
and divide until somehow the spaces—between

halves of bleeding tomatoes, tomatoes
and their skins, bone and pork, anvil and flake—

are as many as the pieces newly rent.
And believe you me. . .

It’s long division, this night split of rest,
this arm and its body (carrying digits,

concentrating on splitting in whole numbers),
long division that makes the in-between desirable

as the vivisected halves. Long division
between my body and the twisted blanket, us,

between the you and yous so several now
at this hour, this so-soon moment,

between me and what may well be ceiling.
I look up and feel the difference, the new distance

between myself and everything else.
The television’s glow fogs upward,

coagulates and spreads. The light is just
light. On and out without border,

order or division and I want to
say aloud, to say the word: Divorce.

To test its magic heft, as if the di-
the verb or noun contains could part the sea

of anything cast before it. And believe
you me, it’s the last knife you’ll ever. . .

The repetition comforts, the call-and-response
of audience and chef, as though this thing

designed to come between could be,
once employed, the last

to ever come between. And he keeps
cutting (he must!) he slices, he cuts

prices and sells. The things dismembered
are brushed aside that the blade may

take center stage. The tomato bits, the metal,
bone and meal, tendon and plastic packaging

mix in a bin below, as remnants of an autopsy
performed to sell the scalpel. Acquainted

for the first time, the flotsam embraces
with its dissimilar limbs. My arm begins

to come to; the pinprick reminder of nerve that knew
nerve, the reacquaintance of disparate parts,

armpit and fingertip, tendon and vein,
is wet and sexy and new. The limb embraces

itself as if in orgasm, as a hawk might love
itself most after its first flight. I look

through flexed fingertips at the hushed,
changing permeation of blankets, the way the curve

of your hip limns the landscape of the room
beyond, steadying the far wall and window

in an improvised, ecstatic prayer.
Not an edge, a jut of provocation in the outline

of your form, the things that are distant—
television, sleep, midwestern exwife

and sting of waking limb— remain distant.
and believe you before I sleep again I remember

the mess of refuse in the chef’s unwanted bin,
my eyes closed to the memory of a severed limb.

©Jeremy Gregersen