Karl Sherlock
A gay and disabled writer and poet, Karl Sherlock holds a M.A. in Creative Writing from the UWMilwaukee, and a MFA in Poetry Writing from UCIrvine. His recent work appears, or is forthcoming, in Broken Lens, Eunoia, Marrow, Mollyhouse, Neologism, New Feathers Anthology, Panoply, RockPaperPoem, Science Write Now, Stoneboat, Streetlight, Sunshine/Noir III, Third Street, Third Wednesday, and others. Karl is a Sundress “Best of the Net” finalist for his disability memoir about marrying an electroconvulsive reparative therapy torture survivor of the Battle Creek Sanitarium. A professor of English, Karl lives and teaches writing courses, including Poetry Writing, from home in El Cajon, California, where he care-gives to his now chronically ill and disabled husband as well as their 28-year-old parrot.
Negative Capability
Your body knows what it knows. It accepts that absence
has shape, tactile and tepid as thumbnails. That scapula
retains a memory of the boy you once were, hiding behind
the long living room drapes, to trace in secret the contours
of his ugliness: the warm hollow of jugular notch; his sharp
nobbled shoulders; trilobite ribcage. That hands can discern
the curvature in the null skin of absence, liminal as mercury.
That its gravity, like a child, may shyly reach for you, lift itself
into your plaintive margins. That your belly’s hollow knot
had doubts, but you acquiesced; let your body become
a cipher in the void. And, in exchange, absence gifted to you
its love, boundless and tangible, for all this negative space.
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