Working with Jimmy Above a Drop Ceiling

We inhaled slag wool in the throat

of a Tennessee summer, installing cheap

can lights, like capping off gapped teeth,

to illuminate an emptied-out dentist office.

Back and forth we passed saws and drills.

Each of us balancing on top of  ladders,

I listened to his slurs bleed into conspiracy

theories. I listened to how his mind split

the country into a wound we could not suture.

For four days my right hand had echoed

with a phantom pain, like a dog bite,

from where I touched a live wire. I recoiled

at everything: the sound of  his voice

like a screw being stripped, the slightest lean

in the ladder beneath me. When we had finished,

covered in sweat, dusted in particle matter,

quiet except for the interstate running

like a generator outside, beneath the gaudy lights

we’d just installed, he took off his shirt, lifted

his arm, and pointed to where a bullet had entered

and never exited. He asked, maybe jokingly,

if  I wanted to touch it. And if not for fear,

if not for thinking there could exist some lesson

in understanding what is familiar yet foreign,

I touched—with the foolish caution the casing

could again ignite and continue etching out

its phosphorescent history—the marred skin,

like a small country, beneath his shoulder.