Heaven to Touch

There was this time when everyone ignored the springtime gusts and bowed to the prevailing spiel and trailed their pollinated limbs like sugarcoated candy. Honeybees still dream on this.

Stella is gleaming under a sunset, her oil-spill skin an extension of her faith, which only believes in money and loveliness and sweat. 

Her wife is nameless and brilliant, lost in a shadow thing, spoiled by beach proximity, shifting from cheap decaying sushi to plastic pails and tiny spades reeking of chemical falsehood. Glitter and attenuated nudity. What, after all, do you dream?

She wanted to remember all the stuff from before, her oldest friend, her first unencumbered love, and yet she stumbled on it, fumbled her surety, and never quite picked it up. This was the ravens’ time. 

Her sister tried to warn us. She squeezed herself into a space by the Mexican place, the lime of her dress translucent in the late afternoon, Frankie Valli joyous on somebody’s radio. Locale, locale, O margaritaville, I will love you over and again for your sweet fucking face.

My heart so wide, kitty corner, my girl was getting off shift.

“Where is any of this happening?” we heard our mama say. 

“Not entirely sure,” the consensus managed. 

She was right, though, to ask. None of this felt real. Perhaps our stage had been displaced, or endless asphalt suddenly emerged like a new undreamed-of stage, where quiet Canadians might just drive a monster Dodge and jump the curb and grind the bones of the infidel. Or more likely the innocent. Blastocysts and freaks. Thermonuclear glow and schism and shear and bellow and bloom, a groan from bellow. A killing ground upon which our raven idol endlessly chides and scolds.

We’ve been hearing auroras and cicadas wrong all this time. Loneliness is breaking us.

Sometimes you think I know you love me, but I just jumble all those words. 

I met her out back, and we merged our hands and strolled beside the canal after sunset. Lights in some of the barges orange-cozy hearts. Inns and taverns looming and leaning, a night of sheer, an urgent whisper: be here, stay here, be heard, always heed the night birds. 

A lonesome drunken song lamenting paucity. 

“How is it we only meet when everything is wrong?” she asked.

I was quiet. I had no answer. 

“Well?” she tried again. 

Perhaps, I thought, it takes our twisted theory of string to find some unravelled knot and tie a new entire universe atop our flailing premise, but thankfully I never got around to voicing such a desperate and stillborn thing.

____________

Image © Rebecca Loranger

Window

“Heal, heal, little frog’s tail

If you don’t heal today, you’ll heal tomorrow.”

*

These are life’s moments sans frames.

Uncle Fred loans him his classic convertible for the day. Tyrell revels in the breezes of the city, even if they’re redolent of asphalt and bitumen. He feels his maleness distilled. He imagines a simpler time, a world of clean skies and sullied earth, of bright busy crowds and dirty, scheming besuited men and acid women leaking betrayal.

His smile is a midsummer signal. 

When he hears the brief yelp of the siren, the sun at its noonday apex, he’s so honey-sated pollinated and sure he isn’t speeding that his guard is down. 

There’s a shadow at his window ’bout to fall across his whole life.

“Hello, officer. How can I help you, my dude?”

“Hands on the fucking wheel! Now!”

We don’t need to see it; we’ve already seen it. Some mother will see her son’s last moments on some stranger’s body camera.

***

“They didn’t take his life; they took the rest of his life.” 

“What’s the difference?”

“I just like accuracy.”

***

Through a smeared window, I watched her. She stared ahead, at a wall. The wall had some old school swirly design in red that I can’t describe, and probably has a name, yet it stayed with me, this moment, this scene, her yellow hair around her architectural shoulders, her still eyes, a room smoky with age and all the mundane moments it had held.

A choice came to me. Leave now and this would dissipate, or go in and rewire destiny.

I went in.

***

It’s an eye. An eye isn’t a window to anything. It looks out not in. If it offends, pluck it out. Be my guest. Take that razor and slice, my Andalusian dog.

Let’s get biblical and trade. Leave the whole world blind.

For the sake of the sacred and the profane, please, obliterate the pane.

*

“Sana, sana, colita de rana

Si no sanas hoy, sanaras manana.”

______________________

Image © David Humphrey

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

East and South

He read the note by the side of the road, right after he got punted by the irate trucker.

Handwritten, it said this:

Boo,

I love you an all. I cain't always be mad atcha. But you get right with your ownself or with God or maybe both. Then y'all can think about comin home and bein with me.

Your trusty girl,

Francelle Elesha Metcalf

Even before the trucker picked him up, he'd found it folded in the small pocket inside his flight jacket where he often kept a baggie of something, but he'd never read it till now.

"Fuck that trucker," he said, and then he almost laughed at the sound of the words. The brazen poetry of them.

"Fuck Francelle Elesha Metcalf." Words that felt a notch or three less funny, less poetic. She'd signed her whole name and taken time with the script, and something about that made him feel quite shameful.

By a stand of spindly trees, he tuned out his thoughts by listening to the interstate traffic, each approach of a laden semi-trailer some great breaking wave, an ex-surfer's fitful pipe dream. Yeah, he'd surfed awhile, at Ocean Beach, back before things had gotten murky as sequoia light at dusk. Ruby and gold, sapphire and emerald. Before it all went gray, like so many flavors of beach taffy chewed too long.

He'd made it a long way from the ocean by now, somewhere east of Sacramento and heading for Lake Tahoe, but this was a big place.

The Golden State, they called it, if that was where he was still. Not so golden now, though, right? Lots of reasons for pain but many more ways to buffer that pain. He figured skirting closer to his roots, partly east and vaguely south after Reno, might could cure him. Tease out his Southern truculence, slap him upside his dumbass head, wake him back to the world.

Kickstart the process, at least.

This stretch of interstate wasn't as busy as some, and he thought he could get away with hiking the shoulder. Fall was waiting all around, free of trust and dark with thieves. Before he set out again, he listened to the leaves in the aspens or whatever the fuck kind of branches shimmered and flashed against workshirt skies here. Heard birds he couldn't name. Squawks and whoops, hollow and distinct.

Tried not to think about much.

When that proved hard, he pulled out a pocketknife and dug into the quick of his thumbnail. The pain was bright as a sun flash and warm too.

Then he headed sorta east and kinda south.

***

The cop meant business or worse, he could tell. Moment the trooper clocked him, there was no doubt he'd be pulling alongside in his two-tone Dodge Charger to make his already shitty life a tiny bit worse.

"What you doin' on the interstate, boy?" Pudgy and bald, another cliché.

"Nothin' much."

"That ain't no answer. I'll ask you agin."

"Sir, I'm walking so's I can find a place to git offa this highway, swear to god."

"You got a long walk, and none of it legal."

"And I do apologize for that, officer."

The cop squinted at him. Raised his sunglasses to his absent hairline.

"Boy, you Mexican or something?"

"I ain't Mexican."

"But somethin', am I right?"

"I'm an American."

"You got ID?"

"Not on me."

"Then we got ourselves a problem, don't we, cholo?"

"Not if you decide to be decent. Sir."

"The fuck you just say?"

"I think you heard me."

"Get on the fuckin ground!"

"You made your decision, I take it."

"On the motherfucking ground!"

He dropped and lay prone and tried to ignore the jackhammer in his chest. Officer GhostFace McBigot cuffed him tight as he could, but he blocked out the pain.

"I'd wager something, officer."

"Shut the fuck up."

"No, I won't. I'm done shutting up. I'd wager my life on this. That you would never have acted this way before that pitiful senile prick lucked into power."

"Then you'd lose your life, Pablo. Or Alvaro. Or Fucko. Whatever. I ain't changed a damn thing. Don't matter to me who parks their fat ass in that crumbling hovel in DC, pendejo, a place that means the exact sum of nada to me. I've hated you people all my life. I'd be doing this if the Dalai Mother Lama of Cal-fucking-cutta was running our sorry nation. I hate you fucks, and I've always hated you fucks. You'll never get that, it seems. And now you won't get it again, cabrón, because…"

"Sir? No. Please…"

Out of nowhere, he couldn't recall seeing a plane in that dry implacable sky for days. Had everything crumbled this much?

Another sharp gunshot startled a cluster of nameless birds, and no one else bothered to flinch.

Each Snowflake and All the Snow

This Might Even Be a Poem

Grief falls like the gentlest of snow on the hedgerow. Shalista drives alongside.

Bye, Felicia, Calissa, Moesha, all her sisters in the rearview as she steers the rented Fiat (hired, they say) along an Irish backroad, wipers stiff and punctual as metronomes. Trombones in the tightest horn section.

Grief is each snowflake and all the snow. Tune the radio and listen to a man with a butterscotch voice recount atrocities. That there is our precise, our lurid century. 

Endless carmine-purple heads of fuchsia bowed beneath the steady weight of white. And that is not a metaphor. The shame of colour underneath a steel-grey sky, wishing for something else, wanting the comfort of some other, to find some way to hide.

You are camphor, an aroma, a bitter blessing offered by a wraith.

Find a place to sleep. Some quiet B&B. An old barracks. Banagher, Ballincollig, Bantry Bay. Where no bad things happen, no boys playing football in a sunshower field in June are murdered for wearing the colours of the enemy. No one is raped or robbed of breath by power. Of agency bereft. You, my dark and blessèd swan, are an American woman. You too have ancestry. Some things you may never discover. But most you surely will. Welcome, Shalista. Welcome, love. Tread tenderly. Listen. 

Look at your amazing things.

***

She's heard all the names a million times. The ones aimed at her heart. The casual ones half-barked in passing that once in a while still stop her in her tracks. Words for her race. Her gender. Pitiful slingshots of the boilerplate bigot. At times she wonders if this world's some godawful dream, created on some steamy bayou, sweated by some reeking white man while he rakes his humid ballsack with yellowing fingernails. 

Then there was that moment she found a cousin on the internet and almost thought she might escape.

Ireland. Where black ain't black and white ain't white, and everything is forty shades of emerald.

To Eire is human. The map of our journey is traced in random fibres, some of them divine. 

***

She pulls into the car park of a pub, Róisín Dubh. The gravel under her tires is frost giants crunching ice. All is cold as a witch's hole in January, her breath as she steps from the rental the traceried ghost of the world's tree. However dark our skin our bones and breath are white. This Celtic place, these Nordic tales. All our tormented, discordant ancestry. 

What a woman does is know her kin.

***

They take you in. Things quickly fall apart, grow terrible.

"Shalista, love, just eat your food."

"Ain't ever ate no horse, but I already know I hate it."

"It's not horse, my girl, it's liver."

"The hell? Meet mother Africa, bitch-ass fool."

The melting snow uncovers something worse.

Your eyes peeled and your ears on twitch.

Radar, antennas, the very edge of the apocalypse. 

You or they won't easily or ever forget this.