absolutelynthng
We never changed the channel. It was stuck there for months until father died. I said it wasn't right but no one listened. No one listened to the weather man, either; and they wonder why we're here now. Elijah would be able to tell you why, I know that.
I don't know a lot of things, but I know the channel never changed and my mother sang hymns to herself over the news reports. She scrubbed the vinyl siding of the house like it would protect us from germs, and the weather man bathed in the light of the camera like he believed people actually cared about the sounds his mouth made.
Elijah cared about the weather man. I mean: he cared about the sounds coming out of my mouth. He tucked me into bed on the nights we had sleepovers, and he made sure to kiss my forehead before we talked about the moon.
I was a weatherman and he was a moon-man. We studied things in the sky that controlled the molecules of our lives. No one listened to us except the insects huddled in the baseboards.
On the day before my father died, I heard him talking to himself from the other room. He was asking to change the channel, but we were all too afraid to touch the buttons. Our fingers were too tender, and the channel too familiar by then.
He lied in his musty bed and bathed in the sound of his own voice as if he were as important as the weather man on cloudy day.
Elijah got up from the old recliner and ran his eyes over the whole house--my mother through the window, my father's lips moving in the other room, and my pale face staring back at him. Defiant, he reached for the dial on the television.
After, he said the moon made him do it; he said even the weather man could've known it. Elijah cared about things like that, knew why he did the things he did. He studied shapes in the sky and thought he was the only one to hear them. He said there was an old man up there and he was speaking.
Does even the weather man listen to himself anymore? Maybe he sings hymns over his own predictions and waits for kisses on the forehead like child begging for good dreams.
When my father died, there was only a sliver in the sky. Does the moon know its own phases? I'm too afraid to ask.
I like to pretend a poem is stable
and that the words are the building blocks
of life, or maybe they're just thin, hollow
cardboard boxes, patterned with bricks--
the ones I used to play with outside
of the counselor's office.
As a child, they let me stick my hand
in the bottom drawer. I pulled out a reward
each time, and they would praise me
for telling them all my feelings. I think maybe
this is how I learned to speak my feelings:
For a prize, for a toy that I ached for
and it probably helped me, the puzzles
we're fun to do on the carpet of her office
and she hung my pictures up and maybe that's
a kind of love; the kind I needed then.
The ringing always made me cry. Sal never cried; and the babies didn't, either. Just me. And the watchers always came to our doorway and stood in it when I did. They spoke emphatically over the noise; broke into the atmosphere with their mouths, opening and closing like mourning glories in a time lapse, a race, an archive of utterance.
For years the world collapsed into a time lapse of openings and closings.
She thought she could re-imagine the tumble into just the way it sounded, the softness of cashmere, weightless and spun into wrinkle-free perfection. How to re-shape the act's harshness into smooth edges bringing refinement and not a violent dizziness and grass stains on her favorite Sunday dress.
As if the tumble was everything we
had ever dreamed of--our falling like the confusion
of waking in the moonlight; our features,
shadows on the wall.
And I forced my hands into tools and forged
a new outline on the canvas, redefining you in silhouettes
of the deepest contrast. Ready-made statue,
you sat in stillness, awestruck.
Years passed and the moon, it never left us,
even for a moment. If you spoke before that night,
it never reached me, and even then, I only heard the words
as though a burnt out star, years and years into the future.
His grandfather had lived near the seaside. He remembered visiting him during summer vacation with his family, before Greta had died, and before the seaside vacations became the grave side vacations. He said this, but he knew he was exaggerating it in his mind. He knew that they eventually became themselves again. His body could recall the the ache of walking up, towards the shore, in all its developmental stages.
And though he knew this, sometimes he forgot it, found the projector in his head stuck on Greta's name etched in granite and his father weeping as if he were a child, too. Or the look on his mother's face that told him not to ask for this. This. He could hardly think what This was. But he knew he had been ripped from it, made to play in the ant hills while the other kids smiled at each other and their parents smiled back at them.
On the other side of the country, he found himself aching again, walking up the grassy side of the embankment, the smell of the seaside in his nostrils. He thought it funny, how the seaside always felt location specific, not the side of the sea, but the sea side of the country--and certainty the seaside was the east side, not the west.
But he was coming over the crest now, and surely it was there--the sea. And he was on the side of it, soon to be entangled in it and, thinking this, he felt the phone in his pocket vibrate, breaking him as near as any wave would have done anyways. When he pulled it out of his pocket and saw the name, he laughed lightly. Above him, a seagull coasted on the air, calling to someone, or something, out of sight.
It was the birth of a movement. It sprang forth from our own bodies, groping for sustenance and stumbling.
I learned to sway in the dining room. My mother taught me how to move just so; she taught me to shift my weight in the most mesmerizing way. It was to the tune of Glenn Miller on the gramophone; my father stood in the doorway and called me a looker. I didn't know then what he meant, but I do now. I do now.
When my mother said 'sway,' she always meant it doubly so. When my mother taught me how to sway, she taught me how to speak the language of persuasion. Every night I practiced in my room, my girlfriends reading magazines on the bed and laughing.
We learned to sway in the back room of the music hall. When we said 'sway,' we meant it triply so. When we said it, we saw the other's hips our head, in circles, dizzying. When we said it, we implied the language of persuasion but knew we didn't even need it. When we said it, we trembled with fear and touched our soft lips together behind the magazines.
When he turned the page, his finger brushed the mustard stain at the bottom edge. At least that's what he thought it might be; hoped it might be. This is what he hated about library books. He'd read them all his life but still, he just couldn't get used to it. The book was practically tainted now; he knew that he'd feel the reverb of it on every page successive page. It would seep into the story itself, become imbued with this crusty yellow aura.
The tree lacked all its branches. It was bare, except for a small leaf growing out of its trunk, about halfway up. The tree was the only one in the town and the people prayed to it.
The town lacked all its trees. It was bare, except for a small tree growing out it, about a mile from the town center. The town was the only one in the country and the government prayed to it.
The country lacked all its towns. It was bare, except a small town forming in it, just on the border. The country was the only one on the planet and the world bank prayed to it.
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