Imaginary Other

In theatre school I learned the eye of Prometheus,
how to fashion a tilting body from brick, bestow a blush,

offer fire. Stanislavski called it the imaginary other,
the partner you mold from air to provoke reaction.

Now at the open mic you pry open my jaw snakelike,
lure out the unformed lines. I pin you to the windows

as my hand maps the mic stand, and my rhyme reels out,
and I tempt our past selves with mixed myths,

let your shadow extract truth from my body like a flitting
swarm from a box. It seems you still are unspooling me,

roping out my gut responses in a Meisner drill
on a burgundy green room floor. You never asked

what I wanted from you, what I would’ve given my liver
to give you. And now from the bar wall your clay outline

plunges an arm down my throat and hurls up my honesty.
I can’t forgive how I crave the opening, how I carve

your easy grin on the liquor shelf, how I still conjure you
to access myself. Afterward the lines flare through the room.

A sticky relief sweats in the limp sheet of my eyelid,
licks off my skin like stolen flame.

Kaley Hutter is a poet, scholar, and essayist from Virginia, where she also teaches collegiate composition and wonders about space and place. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in The Harvard Advocate, Meridian, Funicular Magazine, West Trade Review, and multiple other journals. Kaley’s favorite color is that periwinkley part of the sky 45 degrees above a Blue Ridge sunset.