Originally appeared in Locust #8. Splash image is by Laura Fair-Schulz
it’s not enough,
vain beggar,
you holograph,
holograph-ed onto chilled paper.
an image of hands curled inward.
an image of smokestacks cutting ‘cross the horizon.
holographic wonder years.
image imaged.
crestfallen flag.
shadow game of grot and grim.
give me a machine gun.
this is love.
this is tilting love.
this is brass love,
oh death
brassy death and copper rounds,
spent shell casings.
brassy death and comrades,
green death and red death
and just death enough,
pocketfuls of death,
everything full and spilling,
spilling and spinning away like milk,
spinning away like milk in the black loam,
poured away like milk into silk flashing,
life and the living,
the struggle to bring meat to mouth,
ashes
and ashes.
to dust I spoke.
I never said a word in silence or pity.
I never said a word or spoke a spell or hex or curse,
never enough,
poor worker.
these hands,
these hands on mine are free and calloused.
these unknown hands far away,
so far from home.
neck stained blue with sweat,
hours from home,
oceans away from home by the hour.
a woman breathes and waits in the night
for these hands,
for anything.
shades of gray from home,
piles of cracked concrete from home,
ages from home
where a woman breathes and waits in the night
like unfinished suicides,
where a woman breathes and waits and slices
into the night
this is death,
these parasitic hours sitting through the night
searching for gold
or the tones of gold on the air,
sniffing for sight in a dead breakroom,
in a camel-backed car
and these hands are a million miles
from home.
god, to work like this,
to work like this forever
so far from yourself
sitting and waiting for those hands to cover yours,
to work like this,
spread thin like this,
unbearable distances in the night
imagine looking forward to your job
because your second job swallows more time
and both swallow more of you than you have.
you never get you back.
you fall away a piece at a time,
an hour’s wage at a time,
groaning and dying one red cent at a time,
falling out of time,
your name written in thalidomide.
your name falling,
your bones turned to lead.
these hands in the night.
these hands.
what’s left of me,
what’s not left behind,
i’ll be home in the morning.
I’ll be home with the sun
to curl beneath your hands,
to settle in between you and the dogs,
to breathe beside you in the light of the TV
for a few soft hours
beneath the remains of the night.
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