The Interrogation
Amit Majmudar
When they leathered his arm to the armrest and began
like manicurists in a nail salon
he says that he "retreated" from his hand
until the part of him that dwelt there once was gone
and heard no news from his own outer reaches.
In his memoir1 of those years, he sketches
the tricks he used, one of which was "vision."
Maybe it's better we present his version:
"I imagined my arm as a slope I had to scale,
shaft of the humerus as smooth as shale
but white like bone and giving way like sand
wherever I set foot. I couldn't stand,
couldn't t
