Because Just Last Night I Was Saying When I’m Eighty Years Old—

. . . then stopped dead, the sentence waning like a tooth in the milk—. Or instead foreordained into a cavern tangential as a root in its silt-silken bed of underdark. That the shark looks like it survived extinction. Long division. Other deprivations. Cracking my neck, my knuckles, ships in bottles. Ancestry dot com, Old Spice, widow’s peak. Nay, longevity not a strong suit in my family’s DNA. Suicide—intentional or not. Or heart failure. Or kidney failure. Or liver failure. Or fluid in the lungs. Or blush-less, bluish, car-tossed into the gully of a roadside ditch & not constellation of axils & pixels revealed as shadow-mark upon the mind, a bruised brain. Rain Swell is to Wednesday as atrophy is to a tarnished trophy. A comma confused between a hum & a sigh. I just needed to get through this day, I just needed to get through the daily. Scab before scar, scar after stitches. How the eldest, my father’s mother’s father would piss himself as soon as we washed him, would smear fistfuls of shit on the wall, spitting rabid yowling for all heaven, hell, & in between to hear, I’m still kickin’ just to spite you, you-sons-a-bitches!!! That, like a bird pecking at the window, the dog’s howling breaking night’s silence’s an omen of the bereft yet to come. Vegetative state, vertices & edges, language like a wave, surrenders undone. Mammogram. CT scan. Biopsy. Best go first [, for] whom the gods love drag the oxen cart—Herodotus for justice is lacking in the moral order of the world. Beget begets begot. On an organ, honeysuckle rose playing playing playing. Midlife. Just getting started. Yesterday’s all eyes in the back of your head & the present’s a double-wicked candle & tomorrow’s a bone sword lodged amid the rafters of the hereafter. But that’s Big Fish. TV dinner with a brownie. I just needed to get through today, I just needed I need to get through this day. That’s all laundry. The blood that changes water’s conductivity. That’s that childhood penny jar my balled copper-fattened hand couldn’t fit out of. But that being the point. I could keep as much treasure as I could clutch, only to find they slipped thru my fingers the more I tried to hold onto them.

Read more from Issue 19.2.