Tenure

by Sadie Divoux

Art by Amy M. Young

They immersed me in antiseptic. Five marked the telemetry. The arm, dragging its burnt nerves. Saw me—

knit one, purl one with the glass dogs teeth. Polymers melt like snow. Give way the striation. Plastic for a tendon and sinew.

I play dead in the mouth of the slumlord. Deny his tampering and metallic shuffles. We hold up in the loop of a factory winch.

I’m cocked for five more years in the sling. Cracking up a splint. Always a stickler our slumlord. One-fifty in the ledger, two-fifty for him.

Amy M. Young, Unsaid Unseen

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