Poetry from NER 42.3 (2021)
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without realizing it, absently, hundreds of times
each day. A human face I do not notice

is there. When I touch it, I hardly register 
the sensation. In the film Onibaba, 

a woman fears abandonment, being left
to kill stray soldiers by herself, and so to scare

her widowed daughter-in-law into staying,
dons a mask. A horned mask, demonic, 

leering eternally. It is raining when she wears it 
and the rain makes it stick to her face. This is meant to be 

a punishment for her deception. She chooses 
to wear the mask, after all. She knows 

she is wearing it. This is why it disguises her. 
As I watch her claw at the mask, desperately trying 

to pry it from her face, I touch my own. 
Somewhat blemished and unshaven. A mask 

you do not know you are wearing is a mask that disguises 
the world. Tosses a sheet over it. Now 

could be anything under there. I will tell you
this. Fear is taught. You are taught what to be

fearful of, as much as you can carry 
and not be paralyzed or so weighed down 

that you cannot lash out or unlatch 
the bedroom window as smoke seeps in 

below the door. Something does not need to shrink 
for it to grow smaller. As a room fills 

with smoke, it is relieved of habitable space. 
Fear is like that. It collects in the body

and you have to crawl on the floor of yourself 
to breathe. Thalassophobia billows dense  

and black above me. So too my fear 
of every bristle of hair on a tarantula, 

every millipede leg, every talon 
piercing a hide, every fang, every dewclaw 

has been wafting steadily under the door,
through the half inch needed for it to open 

properly. It isn’t my fault. Nothing is
ever stricken from the record.

What I fear is a record of who I am.