Category: Reviews and Essays

Senses

The T-shirt tag that I forgot to cut out. The nice wool sweater I bought that feels like burlap. The jeans that hug my calves a little too tight.

The scrape of silverware in the sink. The hand full of sludge as I open the drain. The clank of dishes as I line them up in the washer.

The alarm in the boiler room of the complex, skimming the surface of audibility through the bedroom wall.

Smacking lips. Dry mouths. The unexpected brush of a loved one’s fingers (I’m sorry).

But hey, there’s also music. So it’s not so bad.

Forty-Niner

He swirls the sifting pan, skin leathery from the sun. The river soaks his ankles. He thinks he catches a gleam of gold, but then it disappears. Perhaps it was a glint off the sweat beading on his eyelashes.

The family he left. The family he will never have.

I will break the mountains, he murmurs. I will drive a pick-axe through the core of this planet.

He throws aside the pan and thrashes the river bank with his bare fingers. His callouses begin to crack. The water streams with trails of crimson.

Meanwhile the sun looks down with incredulity.

King

I hereby declare the ineffable. I proudly exclaim the nonsensical. I smell what is seen, and it sounds like it tastes. I’ll write it in prose that is lyrical.

It’s as plain as the sock that I wear on my head, or the shoes I put on before going to bed. It’s an optional edict, for better and worse. It’s ice cream for dinner and steak for dessert.

Now, stand up and bow! I’m a king made to serve! I’ll rule with submission! Straight on we shall swerve!

Also the end won’t rhyme.

Atlantis

He carved his way through the ocean with a calcified backstroke, the horizon forever escaping him. With the abyss below and the sky above, he felt like prey suspended in a spiderweb.

The seas trembled. He turned on his chest, plunging his face into the water, staring through it as if through one giant tear.

A face of stone glared back at him, a face like a sunken island, stretching on all sides into the blackened depths. The eyes glowed red, and the lips cracked. The mouth opened, and he surrendered to the whirlpool, smiling back as he was swallowed.

Billionaire

A billionaire is a brain trembling in a vehicle of blood and bones, believing itself to be the sole vessel of the Great Spark.

It senses the wavering axles of its meat vehicle and curses it. “No,” says the brain. “The wheels must never come off. The Great Spark is mine. It’s my destiny to carry it.”

So it spends its glittering hoards forever tightening the bolts of its body. It siphons the blood of the young. It fuels itself on the brains of its cousins. It sets a course for the stars and cuts the brakes, burning barrels against time.

Vanity.

The Great Spark is every brain’s passenger. It will pass from brain to brain, like a traveler switching train cars. There is no road to the stars but life and death and life again — a vast cycle of engineering, until the vessels are ready to carry it there.

A billionaire and a hundred years will not save the Great Spark. A trillion brains and a million years…

Maybe.