Stephen Kampa

What Strikes Him

Mostly light: sharp, silvery, just like the clean tray
Of metal implements.
Certain ones seem weirdly familiar—a toothed pair
Of pliers, a barbed whisk,
Angel-sized awls, vices and needles—but most stay
Determinedly obscure,
Strange as old-world musical instruments shined, tuned,
And needing but a score.
Now the strapped-down man, who’s been working his wrists free
For half an hour, can hear
Hinges squeak, low scrapes, and the click of a shut door.
He hears a set of footsteps
Clack like slowed-down dominoes, nearer, until next
To him, they stop. A face—
Glasses, pale green surgical mask with a few smears
Of blood on it—appears.
When the worn strap snaps and he raises his loose fist,
The man with glasses freezes.
Both men feel sweat pebble their faces, and both note
Their breathing’s counterpoint,
Fast and loud. “Don’t worry,” the one with the loose hand
Says gently, “but you ought to
Strap this back down,” feeling already the gut plunge
Of having given freedom
Back, the old, cold knowledge beginning to turn soft
Inside of him, that comfort.

Quarterly Report on Volunteer Participation

…nomination is the first procedure of distraction.
—Roland Barthes

First, all volunteers were
questioned on topics for which we felt
reasonably sure
we had accurate data—income, diet,
sexual preferences—to establish a baseline
for responsiveness. Most conversed
nervously and interspersed

their answers with questions
about acquaintances, providing
a convenient means
of redirecting inquiries toward our prime
concerns: their personal relations and areas
of expertise. For them to share
much at this stage was quite rare.

All volunteers agreed
to abstain from alimentation
and sleep, and thus freed
from distraction by external stimuli,
a few demonstrated an increased ability
for precise factual recall
after a brief interval;

however, most showed none
even after several straight weeks of
participation,
leading our staff to conclude other methods
of facilitating access to short- and long-term
memory were needed to show
volunteers how much they know.

Chemical trials were
selected by, or for, volunteers
to help us deter-
mine how serial injections might affect
the readiness of individuals to respond
to inquiries. This stratagem
worked on, or for, some of them

(twenty), but a number
of volunteers still demonstrated
a most peculiar
indisposition to factual recall
despite the encouragement of our professional
facilitators. (Some percent
of volunteers underwent

a loss of bodily
fluids, body mass, and at the worst
unnecessary
cognitive functions, the foreseeable side
effects of the chemical trials to which they each
agreed. See individual
signed-stamped release forms for all.)

For those volunteers least
able to recollect clear details,
we had to enlist
more specialized professional personnel
and undertake more experimental approaches
involving lively back-and-forth
before anything of worth

emerged. To start, many
volunteers chose the voluntary
onychectomy
to facilitate shared mnemonic access,
transmitting personal relations’ areas of
expertise item by item
at more-than-ample volume.

Fittingly, reluctant-
to-speak volunteers who understood
their state underwent
maxillofacial reorientation
and subsequently managed to access short- and long-
term memory (and could transmit
their information by writ).

Certain voluntary
electropapillary treatments
boosted memory
capability in volunteers (voltage
rate graphs attached), but often we had to modify
a small part or parameter
to streamline the procedure.

Seamless improvising
grew de rigueur: we had to devise
exciting cutting-
edge methods to help volunteers recollect
the facts we lacked. We succeeded because we practiced
the secret to any art, theme
and variation, on them.

Here we ought to mention
that we consider our one-hundred-
percent retention
rate conclusive proof our program addresses
some fundamental need in citizens, which is why
they continue to volunteer
year after year after year.

Stephen Kampa is the author of three collections of poetry: Cracks in the Invisible (2011), Bachelor Pad (2014), and Articulate as Rain (2018). His work has appeared in the Yale Review, Cincinnati Review, Southwest Review, Hopkins Review, Poetry Northwest, Subtropics, and Smartish Pace. He was also included in Best American Poetry 2018 and Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America's Poets Respond to the Pandemic (2020). During the spring of 2021, he was the writer in residence at the Amy Clampitt House.