ISSUE NO. 16: HAIL MARY

Here we are! Straight through glass walls streaked in fiber glass cleaner, right between little fog plumes there’s our faces pressed at the sides, tacky in sweat and gritty dust or sand, decidedly friends now — just friends — our hands itch for zip flies and warm skin and also wet dirt to sink into. With a mouthful of each others’ spit on the curb, it’s dry and scratchy at the throat, skating past empathy and straight to pretermission, there’s a faint electricity as a result of repeated action where, through diaphanous linen curtain adornments parted in an opus of lace shadows to our hands and to our faces, I am speaking to a more disastrous being, or state of being, saying I miss time, I always will, saying it from my ears, leaking from my eyes and it’s a split tongue that snakes and darts with tides and moon cycles and vaginas.

There were a few lapses. I am having a very difficult time breathing. We have become such great friends. I wonder, at night, what you look like upside down and sometimes naked, or with a hat on. I earn my Class M licensing and buy a self-help book because that’s all I can afford ‘till the next direct deposit. Sometimes it feels all right to pity yourself.

You were chewing on popsicle sticks in bed like an ant colony. Shredded wood pasted the pillowcases in sticky pink residue, like liquid amoxicillin, and the bedroom felt more like a hospital those days, anyway. I asked, How have you been, as if I hadn’t seen you since the coma outset and you stirred in your own eyes wondering where the voice was coming from, the ceiling firstly, and finally falling into my own, I have been sleeping.
 

Here we are! One of us piss-drunk facing a brick wall and the other with their shoes tied together across the street. I see you not here, but ten minutes later, with cigarettes on opposite curbs and a leg splayed into traffic. And, at times I’m spiking cortisol with this repeated lock, with this
shared hue of uncountability and a lopsided stigmatism and a passing wryness, now, hemorrhaging a face of distance. I think, Maybe it’s still all right! Maybe we still have time! And it was me piss- drunk and you with thirty-six waking hours straight, and the distance generates a pulsing flush to cheek and massage to lymph nodes, to ease the cracked hoarseness in dry air, It’s not that far, it’s not too late, I’ll meet you again.
 

I meet you again and remember ten words of it without realizing they’d be a part of the last; Here we are, I say, and I think your cigarette’s caught you fire, you say, oh, I miss time, I always will.

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Mar Wolf