Neurodiversion
by Max Cavitch
Then the reproachful glare of objects began to change.
Everything in his room, the chairs and papers, the shoes
by the door, dirty shirts, the dead wine bottles and
greedy ashtrays, dust-covered books, and even the pitifully
mementoed coffee table started to face him differently,
more benignly. His syncopating pulse settled
for a moderated beat. His jaw unclenched, slightly,
and his brow relinquished its creases of worry. At
last, his hands’ balled-up grip on themselves relaxed,
and he could see the wax-white, fingernailed crescents
in his palm flush pink again, like a skin someone might live in.
Max Cavitch is a writer, teacher, and photographer living in Philadelphia, where he also edits the blog Psyche on Campus. His most recent poems and aphorisms have been published in Brittle Star, Grand, Philosophical Salon, and Politics/Letters. His numerous essays—both scholarly and public-facing—have appeared in such journals as American Literary History, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, The Journal of Wild Culture, Oxford Literary Review, Postmodern Culture, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, Screen, Senses of Cinema, and Victorian Poetry. His books include American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (Minnesota 2007), Ashes: A History of Thought and Substance (forthcoming from Punctum Books), and a new edition of Walt Whitman’s autobiography, Specimen Days, due out this fall from Oxford University Press.