Alex Lemon’s most recent poems are forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Indiana Review, The Journal, Pleiades, Post Road, Swink, Salt Hill, and Washington Square. Among his awards are grants from the Jerome Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Currently, he teaches at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. Scaffolding Alex Lemon It would take jack-hammers to find that other-self. Saw-shrieks, elegies for taste—whiplash, moan & scald. This body is something Giacometti sculpted: wax & molten steel, the die-cast of night’s necessities. Smaller, I beg you, smaller. For fear my outline is neither live nor dead, air dances electric with broken ghosts. Cheeks absent of color: lip after the bite.            * * * Sticky in autumn’s poplar, the voyeur, who may or may not be me, sketches the leaf’s cursive fall. Grasshoppers sleep in amber. This could be feeling: not good, but at least not hurt. I need spells & voodoo to stop time. Close my eyes—bring me willing things, orphans waiting open-armed   for needles, gravel-floored cellars & spiders the size of fists. Underwater, you cannot hear my favorite song: a mouth whispering half my name, all the sheets turned down.