Excerpts from Sir by HR Hegnauer

By Guest Contributor on January 22, 2014

Dear Sir,

I am afraid to say, I love you — a collection of simple sounds. I know this is the softest room in the body, but the navigation is so —. This is what it means to swim in a vivisection, and I like swimming; I do, but I need the tide to be more clear. By this, I mean my thoughts: I need them to just stay a little longer. Please Sir, just stay a little bit longer now. Come with me! It’s time to walk.

Please, help me to hallucinate a clear tide.

Dear Sir,

Were you here again last night? I’m a little bit confused. I heard you in the echoes when you said, Watch out! This is your body. But then I couldn’t find you, and I looked; I really did.

But then I took that bit of blow from that boy who told me his name was Peter Valentine, and I wanted to believe him.

Sir, I am evacuating all of my bodies.

Dear Sir,

Last night I watched Dan walked out the window of his high-rise apartment. I followed him. Someone else watched us do this.

Then I awoke to Danielle calling me, and when I answered she said, Thank god you’re alive!

Later, Rachel asked if anyone else dreamt about the apocalypse last night. Yes. Sir, if living had to be about the body, who made it so?

Dear Sir,

What time is it? A damp translation. A row boat. A sack of a baby.

This is gone though, Sir. Of ever imagining that.

Don’t you get it now, Sir?! Or ever having wanted that.

Listen to me, Sir. I know what I’m talking about! Or known it. From someone.

Sir, are you someone? No, you’re just a ghost. A spook. A haunt and a specter. You’re a shadow now, Sir, and you can’t even visit these colors anymore.

What is it like? Is it like skittering? Please, take my hand. Tell me it is.

Dear Sir,

I’m twenty-eight now, and these bodies are moving quickly, no? What were you doing when you turned twenty-eight years old? It was 1953, and my mother was eight months away from being born. Did you know this?

I’m getting back to being a human again, and I guess this is what it feels like: I had forgotten how cold it can get in bed at night when you’re only one human.

Oh Sir, I just wish you were here again to say human how you always would — how you’d keep the h silent. And I would say, uman is not a word, Sir. And you would say, Well, of course it is. I just said it.

HR Hegnauer is the author of Sir (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs). She is a book designer and website designer specializing in working with independent publishers as well as individual artists and writers. HR is a member of the feminist publishing collaborative Belladonna*, and the poets’ theater group GASP: Girls Assembling Something Perpetual. She received her MFA in Writing & Poetics from Naropa University, where she has also taught in the Summer Writing Program.