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