“Dream I Had About Never” by Tomasz W. Wiszniewski

Kate Shaw.jpeg

Art by Kate Shaw

 

May 16, 2019. Gone to Rita, saintly brick.

 

At wit’s end thumbed thru the mall my viscera

become tightrope-walking rhombuses.

My weariness goes headfirst. I’m divested

of all sibilants, clubfooted, the mall seamy

and windswept, familiar in a wet casket kinda way.

The rain could have been my dying breath.

 

                   I see sex

simulators in disrepair, emoticon affection

vended to paper cutouts

of dads—tarry treacly

castles in their creases.                   I smell hair

heat-rolled, crabs wedged into coolers

full of acrylic nails. Panama City welcomes you

on seventy-foot liquid crystal display! Fake cattails, kittens

on sale, kitten heels, cafe, gumball dispenser, sporting goods.

Panama City. I’ve been here before.

 

I’m a blind trapeze artist produced in four parts,

and I’m watching my fifth perform. I’m an atlas

of my ass’s pixels. I want blood—my own—

in a paperweight—to pitch at the sky. I want never

again to get stuck on the year. Beyond

that ceiling is a vanishing

twin moon. Canvasses my irises. I sense it

ballooning on me. Somewhere an advertisement

flashes the words: Every time you look on the world,

you produce another mirror. I take my blood, hurl it.

 

The escalators, cash registers, walls are corroded.

My impressions of Kant: an empty university: pictures

of Greece: beams of blue light: my alder

bookmark: my sleep. The stars

form a fishing net. I peel off a magnet

from within my opened skull, and inscribed

on the magnet—

my birth date? I can’t tell

if it hurts or not when the air

finally fills my lungs. I can’t tell if I want

to be remembered for the character

of my eyes

or for the way

I fall.

 

 

Tomasz W. Wiszniewski’s first collection of poetry Death Is A White Balloon will be published in fall 2019. He admires thunder and cemeteries, and is online @tomxwinters and tomaszwiszniewski.com

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