What if in
ten years I am alone and healed. What if you see me in the grocery store, a
weather report, oranges, ginseng. You follow me home. I check the mail. Stare
at the web. What if you stay past screen lock. Sunlight goes. I sit
superheating in leaves, disintegrate some, reduce to one of the seven basic
roadkills. What if I already knew how to make the ginseng tea? What if I did
not need YouTube? Skin slough & false bones & defensive
spellcast, my toppling idiot stab into ditches. When one cannot hold oranges,
ride them west. I try not to gouge my head on the stump. Notice the overhead
fist of carrion birds—the oxbow timelines, the over and over. What if I adjourn
to future bunkers of magnets and white silhouettes, paperless, wireless, while,
above, outside, our old watering holes ignite—grain flames precise and eternal,
vigils of O2 rot. What if, me at my subterranean coffee table of
command brevity assembling five thousand Lego-brick caskets, you above ground
in a surface window, inside or out, planed into the same horizon you
dissect—gaze self-eating—there come sirens, cloudbursts, iron oxide evidence
layers pulling loose from archival flesh. On the stairs my heart peeled, a
rabbit skull. Ear to the door. The thrill of ignoring a thing until it’s
aftermath—train lifted from tracks into hopeless flight, codependences careening
to distant ruin. Of remembrance I think, crosses, shafts, pavilions. What if I
slide an email beneath the bunker door. “Engineer my heart’s marble steps up
from this plaza of emptiness to a rectangular terrace 66’ (20 m) long and
42’ (13 m) wide. Inter me in VHS tape from the ‘Xmas 94’ cassette—no more
stripping the past. No bid for reignition. No more sulfurous fruits from the
suicide tree. Just bindings of color-fringed noise and static remembrances at
times cutting, now and then intercut with visions of the nameless red-haired
dancer from MTV’s The Grind. Lake Havasu. Exhibit of dead longing. Her
bleached red echo leaked across finite frames, curated in memoriam, momentary,
vital. Her calories long spent but her face now fading back into flesh. She
belongs as much as any of it. Bind us on the slab. Take this invisible text.
Make it real.”
Jason Kane
has had work appear in places like Juked, Hobart, XRAY, Burning House Press,
and elsewhere. He can be found at Neutral Spaces on the web (https://neutralspaces.co)
and at www.jason-kane.com.
Twitter: @JasonKaneActual
