by Traci Cumbay

Traci Cumbay, *nothing to see here,* digital photograph. Courtesy of the artist.

Hard Surfaces

Traci Cumbay | Jan 2025 | Issue 41

You there, by the window. You, on the clear glass and the
blue pane on the opposite wall where a headboard would be.
Your blue back in the glass across the room, your blue
eyes on the pine tree, or the crows who nested there in spring.

Don’t act like I’m the monster. Wasn’t me who bought the whole stock
of rare green silk just to gesso it hard and paint it black.

I’m way too controlling not to let a special thing be what it is.

*

You call me a huntress, but that’s you in heavy boots, sploshing through mines
with a flashlight, hunting the exact right topaz to smash.

I know, I know: you wear soft shoes. You hike in house slippers.

Not yelling isn’t the same as being gentle. You can murder flies with dish soap.

You’re not going to believe this next part: Being sensitive doesn’t mean you
get to turn my crisis into a heavy chain you beat yourself with. So greedy
for damage you claim mine and then blame me for the bruises.

*

Your back to the blue glass, mine to the crows. I watch you watch
your work but catch my own blue self in the glass. Better your beautiful
intent. Such concentration while you saw off my hands with silk thread
your neighbor brought from Turkey. The sensation where
the thread tears at me. The heat of it.

You press your hand to your chest and say, “here.” I lean my back against you,
all of me warm inside your arms and legs, pressed into your skin. I mistake it
for closeness, but now we both face the window. Your eyes can have
nothing to do with mine.

A thrill when the meaty edge of your hand blesses the inside of my wrist.
The string tight like floss, the magenta of your fingertips the color
of the climbing roses in the garden.

I offer my pocket knife to save your hands from cramping while you work
through me, and you’re indignant: “This is about the process.”

God, I can be so insensitive.

*

All your chairs are bare wood. You’re confused when I
suggest a comfortable chair and point where I sit,
holding my stumps above my heart: “Isn’t that comfortable?”

No. It just swivels. Of course you mistake movement for ease.

One day you’ll move on from hard edges,
probably into your casket. Imagine: softness,
stillness.

Maybe someone can gesso over all of it—gesso over
you, too, only that would be redundant.

*

The crows don’t love you back. There was glass between you and them,
is how you confused it for a relationship.

The crows saw right through you, or so you think when they disappear, and
you fret that you hadn’t been a good enough friend to them.

You make sure I know you’d left them shiny things and water.

*

You wouldn’t believe how many people I bragged to about your
birdcage. That you built it—that massive, complicated, delicate
structure. “Not from a kit, from his brain.”

I should have kept my mouth shut about that birdcage.

It’s there in the blue glass in the picture I take of you sleeping
on my chest. Your contorted face, your body capitulated to mine.

You can only be that open with your mind closed.

*

You call me a huntress because I keep losing my weed. “It might help
to always put it in the same place,” you tell me, “but I think you need
the hunt.” When it turns up in my hiking boot in the garage, you can’t
let that be what it is: a fluke, a one-time thing. You write “hiking
boot in garage” on your wall, where people can see it.

“It’s to help my girlfriend find her weed,” you tell your guests,
and they call that love.

Gesso it up and paint it black. Tell people you had it—love. They
won’t know the difference but I was there. That’s not love. It’s just
a map to a place I got lost once.

*

Crows don’t stay put. They abandon the nest when their babies fletch.
It was their nature, not yours, all along.

The budgie has nowhere to go, just a window for watching the pine tree
and the empty nest. An empty food dish in the cage you built for her.

You tell her she’s beautiful. You tell me she’s happy.

*

You don’t get to decide what kind of care a living thing needs. Stand all day
at your window and pretend to see. There’s a whole other you across
the room, and one of you put a cloche over the aloe.

As if everything wanted cover.

You were so surprised
by how that plant thrived
when I took off the glass.
You were so
surprised.

Traci Cumbay is obsessed with eggs, Vivian Gornick, and portraits that look like they were painted with more love than skill. She’s a freelance marketing writer who lives in Indianapolis with her son but is scheming her way back to Colorado. She gets up early every morning to bake bread and work on her memoir. Guys, it’s almost ready.