To Break the Light of the Sun

“That until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned; that until there are no longer first-class and second-class citizens of any nation; that until the colour of a man's skin is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes; that until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race; that until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained.” — Haile Selassie

Standing like the ancient poet, watching the clarity fill with vague, listening for the falconer, wondering when the gyre will widen or why it will, I shun the history of words. These thoughts so old they’ve stamped themselves as platitudes. This lurch so new its suddenness has staggered me from the surety of my wide-legged gait, tipped me slow-thighed into a dalliance with doom. Have they won? The worst, I mean? Are we on that darkling plain? Encountering fear within a handful of dust? Is the third who walks beside us visible at last?

Amandine. Delphine. My gemstone girls. Unfurl the red, gold, and green. Sing of Haile Selassie and dance with Marley’s ghost. Unleash the burning spear, let it set alight the world, whose boundless reservoirs of tears won’t even suffice. 

What impediments remain for the unfathomable? 

“But there are things which you have said to me which I do not like. They are not sweet like sugar but bitter like gourds. You said that you wanted to put us upon a reservation, to build us houses and make us medicine lodges. I do not want them. I was born upon the prairie, where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures and everything drew a free breath. I want to die there and not within walls.” — Ten Bears, of the Yamparika Comanches.

Do we yet wish to wish these things? The atrocities have returned in hordes and taken on human form. The lies of the elder skies have come as burnt ocher veils of choking ash. The children are betrayed. The great seas boil. 

Make my eyes unsee, excavate my tongue, and lance my ears with spikes; rend my garments then my limbs. But first obstruct all exits and compel me to be witness to this endgame, this dark unholy codicil—me, the last player on the stage when even the audience has exhaled its ghost into the great dome, and I alone am desiccated, woebegone, phantom-swollen with the stillbirth of this calamity, the dreadful pitiful scale of this crime.

“Teach us to care and not to care

Teach us to sit still.”  

Blood a hot torrent down my aching throat, I try yet cannot speak my final words. I will them to issue from the ruin of my gorge, but my ebbing wits, shorting and buzzing, only think them, sheer diaphanous wings buoyed by the last silken breath of a mind already passed:

“Shantih shantih shantih…”

________

[Image credit: © Todd Hido]

Fata Morgana

“It’s a hard world for little things” — Night of the Hunter, 1955

They kicked us off the train I have no memory boarding. It was a dream-pink dawn, the faraway hills aglow and the desert still cool. 

We tried to catch our breath while the long snake moan pulled away, far as it was concerned our existence erased. And blessed be that train.

Around us, an awakening and the assurance of heat. We set out across the desert knowing by the end we’d be less. 

***

My head plays Lana Del Rey on a loop. I can’t do this forever, me looking like you, you looking like me. We are genderfluid twins, my Rivka. Some days you’re all vulpine grace and others your swinging dick ardor is consummate, majestic. I follow the portent of your hips, the sway and flourish of your womanhood. Your masculine name is Beckett, though you wait for no one. You coruscate, play enchantress with the light.

Our history behind us, dragging, a trail to be shadowed. Other songs, snatches and snippets:

“O storm, you were clever; you came in the form

of a girl.”

And:

“They came at us from all sides, yet here we are, 

this killing floor, this abattoir.”

Few true predators anticipate the carnage; they only want to assuage the torment in their gut. Whatever pursues us is not like those others; this one craves the shrieks and the moans that shudder from the charnel house. This one is a horror.

“Morality is dead,” you once told me, your face quiet with import, and so fey. “There can be no light without shadow. Sensation is everything.”

My answer to that is stillborn. It falls from my numb lips and is formless. Let the hawk take it into the pitiless sky and be damned. 

So that brings us to now. The thing is coming; we can sense it in the heat shimmer, the Fata Morgana, a thing distorted however you choose to see it, a dreadful thing. The waiting is the worst. Distractions are like demons sweeping their dripping arms across those faraway hills and grinning and whispering, “Some day this can all be yours.” Distractions both carnal and cerebral could spell our doom. We wait. We dare not fight. We dare not hope.

At the place where all is shrunk to a point, we are each other’s world. 

And though—in the chill desert nights, serenaded by rawboned canines under the spill of stars—you curl your heat against me, I doubt we’re quite yet friends.

*

Image: Grant Durr 

Spurned

I got thirty-five stories; I forgot at least twenty. 

“Her name is Audrey, but everyone calls her Drey, pronounced like the good doctor.”

“Sounds old school, like a movie star.”

“Well, yeah.” 

He wears a blue suit worn shiny at the shoulders and the hip bones, he stalks the common margins, and he might well not be human. 

Don’t ask me to elaborate.

*** 

“Love tangles thickly the world. Green limbs

Hold our throats like snakes. Love

Is the dripping forearm encircling

Everything.”

Here come the dominoes, toppling like we once imagined buildings would topple in a city besieged. Infernos. Towering. But a bright fall day in the early months of a long century taught us that metaphors are cartoons, and these dominoes aren’t bricks with numbers; they’re the salmon run upriver thwarted by a dam, they’re the monarchs starved of milkweed, the bees assailed on every side, orca pods bereft of chinook. And if the salmon can’t spawn, the bears will starve, and the forest won’t be fertilized by carcasses of fish, and the trees will pale. The little coastal wolves will turn on each other. The shiver of disquiet whispered by the conifers will crescendo. The raven’s madcap gulp will go unheard.

In a world of malfunction, everything’s a canary. 

Who brought the voices to drown us out? How did we end up here in the harbour wondering where all the boats went? Which lovers were allowed to consummate, and who was condemned? Spurned is maybe the worst word ever coined. A greasy-haired girl with encompassing hips tiring at the mic. A dancer alone under unflattering glare, the spit and piss of her efforts like COVID, droplets coughed like headspun sweat, the spun lucid dirt of our humanity, the unearned wages of our fluids and spleen. Her goose bumps each an impediment. Her reluctance a blastocyst, each tumour filled with spumes of wrong, each infected globe shimmering on the edge of… what? A song by Nina Simone. A beseechment. Deflated hubris. A worn-out demon coming for us all.

“Drey, tell me another story.”

But she has turned inward like a dying sun. Will there be a supernova?

“Then dance for me. I deserve spectacular.”

But she is still.

What is this world, with its swirls and pirouettes of light? Why are silhouettes of branches like sludge-clogged waterways or the blighted decaying capillaries of terminal patients? Were we wrong? Is everything illusion? Merely local and terribly strange?

Are we seeing the death of hope? Or its birth?

Is sundown the furnace in which the twinkling gems of night are forged?

*

"Great Bear Anchorage" image © Roy Henry Vickers

The Thing That Happened

Glaring into a sunburst windshield, she follows the fiercest of sunsets into town and holes up in the Indigo Motel heedless of the glances and scowls she spurns from strangers. She is a boy who looks like a girl or or a girl who looks like a boy, and though others seem to, she hardly gives a fuck.

This is only her fourth night of separation from the thing that happened. 

Charleigh. Charleigh is her name. When she clicks the grubby remote to figure out the TV, she sees on the grainy screen that the last four occupants had watched the same porn—creepy daughter incest shit—and she wishes she’d grabbed a sleeping bag. In the end, she lays the unrolled towels from the bathroom over the bed cover and sleeps that way, wondering if the towels themselves are clean.

But she knows nothing is ever clean, and that’s a thing we must learn early, before our innocence goes. 

***

Outside, in the brightness of morning, a man sings badly but lustily by the roadside, a troubadour of dust. Charleigh has barely climbed from her dreams, but she knows enough to know the man sings to no other.

“What a terrible thing it is to be.

Where are the birds, the bees, 

The butterflies, the bats?

I hope you know, because I sure don’t see

Where all them critters are at.”

Here’s what it’s like to love someone: every grain of dust on an otherwise mundane trail stays with you, becomes part of a constellation which then becomes a zodiac; each individual birdcall, the slats on a boardwalk, the rising melody of a mutual song, a precious scene from a film, are sonatas in a greater work. The way someone stirs their coffee. Shadows on a wall the shade of a Tuscan sundown. The arch of a brow, the mad inhalation, the bestowal, the grateful burden. All of it.

***

The thing that happened was a killing. It began with Charleigh saying, “Each time I have to ask for help diminishes me” and ended with a sacrifice. Which reckless god or goddess, or what spirit of caprice, demands such? 

Simplicity is always a lie. No thing is simple. She keeps a journal she began the first time shadows transited the flickering sun of her life. She opens it at random:

“The wine stem held aloft, a burgundy shadow on your chest like a bloodstain, or the cowl of arousal, your blessed stung lips barely parted, yet I imagine the honey of your breath.”

Riches. Charleigh has always dreamed of riches, of fulfilment on every level, each bold strata, of hunger and thirst and want and yen and itch. 

Murder is that rarity: bleak and empty yet bright as diamonds, scorched of all warmth yet compelling as a frozen bleep unlit across the black immensities.

The accelerant? A quarrel.

“As God is my witness…” 

“Funny, that. Your god is a being of pure eternal love… yet if you don't stop displeasing him he is going to fuck up your entire existence."

From that to violence and an ending. Her eyes in this dry place are dry now, but tears still tumble somewhere, like reels on a slot machine, waiting to ring up three of anything.

***

Out in a rainy field and the earth is shimmering. All so drenched even the crows have sheltered. A brightness in the pewter canopy, training its muted glory on a single human figure crawling amid the stalks. Crawling though its jellied skull is mostly shambles.

Ω 

Image © Rebecca Loranger

Loiter

Her name was Jazz and she was sixteen. Indigenous. Although she would’ve told you she was an Indian. There are few niceties on the streets, though plenty of rules, most subtle and essential. The silent nod. The proper handshake. The right amount of eye contact. 

The arcade was a bevy of light and sound awake to the night moths, the local and the lost, all children even in their six feet frames and loping coyote swag. Jazz came outside to talk to me and bum a smoke. Every day, pretty much, she checked in. I worked those streets like a pale ghost, and the kids called me England after the faraway place they’d heard mostly bad things about, the source of the calamity visited on their families. Yet somehow, they had room in their hearts for me, room in their hearts for daily insult. 

The cop came out of the shadows. I recognized him. I don’t think that was reciprocal. He wasn’t liked. I could name him, but this was long ago, and is it worth it? Maybe it is? I’ll chew on that. He looked at Jazz blowing grey cloud streamers into the red hawk night, silhouetted against the bright window, the bells and electronic purrs and blurts of the ranks of machines slipping tinny through the door.

Mortal Kombat. Finish him, indeed.

“How old are you?” he asked. 

“Eighteen,” Jazz lied, and I bit down on a smile, pretended to watch the late-night traffic crawl by on Main Street. 

“You know it’s illegal to buy tobacco if you’re under nineteen?” 

“Yeah, I didn’t buy it. It’s not illegal to smoke it.” 

Still biting my tongue; Jazz was doing fine. 

Cop tried a new tack, pointed at something in the window of the arcade.

“What does that say? Can you even read?” 

Yeah, he said that, to a sixteen-year-old Indigenous girl who was bothering no one, a girl who watched out for her brothers and sisters on the street every day with the calm eyes and quiet caring of a young den mother.

She didn’t flinch. “It says ‘No Loitering.’”

“It does, doesn’t it? That’s an arrestable offence, smartass kid.”

He’d never even so much as glanced my way this whole time, just another fellow white guy, a presumptive ally on his humdrum periphery. But I’d had enough. I stepped out of the shadows and offered my wrists, joined ready for the cuffs.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m loitering,” I said and nodded toward the sign. “Arrest me.”

He hesitated, did a double take as if it had dawned on him who I was, and Jazz laughed. Not unkindly and almost joyously, though I thought that might doom us, but something stopped him, and he swallowed whatever impulse had rippled for a second across his belligerent face—the urge to bully someone, his default—then scowled and displayed the angriest red neck I’ve ever seen, and returned to the shadows beyond that chiming bright oasis in the white-sand desert of a pugnacious town. 

Same cop was later rumoured to have rear ended a car of joyriding teens stopped at a light, shoving it into the path of a young single mom, who died in the wreck. 

This was a lone moth among hundreds of other moths, spiralling round a lone light, and there are many thousands of lights and many millions of moths, all spiralling and spinning, right now, out there in the nights painted by neon, smeared by blood, shunned by most, lost by memory. 

***

Image © Ernesto Yerena Montejano