Read my latest story, "The All-Nighter", at 52|250.

In the first stanza of Darlene Anita Scott‘s Something Like an Asshole, or, How to Read the Rind, we once again see the body as comparable to edible things—a mango, meat—but here the comparison has to do with language, how the body can be read as a text, the words handled by teeth and tongue, phonetic. Every part of the body becomes a sign in this text: your palms, the greasy spot on the side he never sleeps on. What the title tells the reader, however, is that this is not about reading the edible parts: rather, it is about interpreting the leftover part, which endures when the rest is consumed but only because it was never intended to be eaten—read—the same way. Of course it is legible if you know how to interpret It right.

When the next stanza claims that [l]overs are the most obvious people / on earth, the proximity to this description of the body implies that what is meant is that the bodies of lovers are easily read texts, and this is confirmed when Naked follows earth with only a capital letter to indicate the beginning of a new sentence; the lack of punctuation emphasizes the relationship between the two sentences. Naked, primarily an adjective about the body implies that the first sentence is about the body too. Readers are called upon to supply their own knowledge of the way glances and small gestures of touch give away the relationship between lovers.

Censors fail them
every time;
may have never been included in the package.

If the body can be read then everything can. The final stanza is an instruction for how to live in such a world:

To catch it all
make your sleeping
like waking.
Eat the bait, remove the hook later.

Be ever alert, take in everything whatever the risk: you can deal with the consequences later. Indeed, the consequences will only give you more to read: 

Let the blood
Rorschach you into
deliverance.

That penultimate line is my only disappointment with this poem and not because I object to the verbification of Rorschach, though my discontent is with that word. With that term, the poet chooses sides, tells readers how to interpret the act of reading (into) every-body instead of letting them interpret the signs (and the interpretation thereof) themselves.

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