Orlando White

CEPHALIC

I place a black cloth the size of a dot over his head, wrap up his entire miniscule body with a thread of my black hair. He lies there on a white sheet of paper and wriggles like a dark cocoon, thinks he is going to transform. The letter, when it begins to lose color in a book never opened, becomes a macula in thought. And when read through the lens of a decimal point: see its dark fleck of a cranium, see expendable language—grab the letter j next to him, hold it like a tiny black scythe, behead the i, and watch its dot head roll to the back of a sentence.