You are my call

I love the sheen from you

like an iridescent smear across

my soul. It glows from chest to face

and arms and legs and all that makes my body

feel for manhood. It lasts awhile past each time

we've pressed upon me but dims like mercury

flowing to within, a silver bright warm

dripping fleck for each cell inside the

walls of every vein and artery

I feel the whitest light

wholly shinning in

me, shining out

of me, until I

meet with you

again

no vessel

for any

soul,

yet It

boomed

‘You’re not supposed to be here.’

an aural assault

by freefall winds

gallowed

as I dove through

God’s eye -

this shape of infinity,

this babelic library,

this God’s godless dream,

My airborne burial.

Iris pulsed

ever-dancing fractals

of rainbowed mandalas,

of blooming flowers

drunk on time.

hues

from unseen spectrums

held vaults hiding

pure volumes,

and breathed.

O Euclidean Renegade,

shames mandelbrot’s set,

stains opalka’s project,

swallows piranesi’s prison,

SPARE ME...

suddenly,

It

sent

me

back

plummeting.

i laid on virgin tinfoil

under placid imitations

of rainbows.

tell me a story

the one with the girl

in blue teared oceans

with red winged scars

and a black filled heart.

tell me a story

the one with the girl

who dances in glass roses

with white whispered secrets

and frozen violet hands.

tell me a story

the one with the girl

with mossy green life

yellow kissed cheeks

and tender pink lips.

tell me a story

the one with the girl

who breathes rainbows.

who wakes in orange rays

and falls asleep in milky indigos

who bathes in light and dark

to grasp what is ungraspable.

Violet is a humble flower, hidden in the shade

Indigo is ripened grapes, coloured with their age

Orange is a candle flame, flickering in the breeze

Red is a little poppy, pretty as you please

Blue is the ocean, spraying cold and wet

Yellow is the sun, as it rises, as it sets

Green is the grass as it sways in the field

Rainbow is the symbol of a promise fully sealed.

When she undresses herself for you, for the first time, you beg your eyes not to stare at her shoulder blades which stick out like cut off wings. Because you’ve been taught that loving a woman relates to brutality in the bedroom and you don’t want to love her the way that men have loved you because you will not let this love become something that greedily takes and leaves no after thought.

So you’d go eons without pressing your body against hers and a lifetime without grazing her bare skin with the tips of your fingers because loving someone doesn’t justify killing them and then easing your innocence by carving a headstone that reads here lies a predator, who made light of all the blood that comes from making a sport of trying love a woman like a man.

And your hands won’t stop shaking hands when she undress herself so you turn away but she grabs your hand and proclaims “No you won’t hurt me.” You let out a breath that you didn’t know you were holding in because she means it and you crawl under the covers. Her lips pressed against mine and hips to hips as her fingers trace my collarbone, and down admist seas.

Sometime later in the night while you sleep, she lies awake stroking your honey colored hair wishing that someone had taught you that sex and love can coexist without mortality. You dream, she has wings again.

I wish it was okay

to long for romance without sex

but the world does a great job screaming at me

how impossible that is

and I don't believe the world, really,

but it's hard not to listen.

Pain was first, the feeling and then the word. It turns out the body comes back before the mind, so my body hurt and my eyes really hurt, but I didn’t have words for it.

And now I am naked in a metal box.

I feel like a kid must feel, discovering their body and the words for things at the same time: hand, hair, arm, palm. I run my hand through the hair on my arm down to my palm. Everything feels cold.

I open the door of the thing I’m in and step in water. It’s freezing, and I remember: they froze me. You have to, Jack, the men said. We’ll come every day, they said as the cold blast hit.

Jack.

The room is huge, cluttered. Boxes equipment and stuff. I cough as my lungs adjust to the air, or it maybe it’s the dust. There’s a locker nearby, with a checked shirt and pants. They must be mine, they feel right. There’s also a pair of shoes and a wallet, with a State of Pennsylvania Driver’s License. Jack Zielinski.

No one is here to talk to this Jack Zielinski, so I start walking.

The sun hurts. The blue sky hurts more and I don’t know why, but it’s wrong. I walk a while. My legs feel strange, and I cough, and I walk. I half see some buildings and people, but I can only focus on the voice I keep hearing in my head. Zielinski! the man calls. Hey, Zielinski! and I can’t see him, but I feel it, and then I say, “Yeah?” and grin and know that’s me, that I’m Jack Zielinski, and then I can look around and see. I can start to take things in.

An old colored woman looks at me with fear, and as she ducks around me on the sidewalk I think, Well that makes sense, but I realize I had said “Yeah” out loud and I’m grinning like a crazy bastard. I laugh.

There weren’t this many cars or people before. Some buildings look familiar and more don’t, and they hadn’t been this tall. There’s this huge black tower above everything. I wonder how much steel it took to build it, and then I know what’s wrong with the sky. Where am I? I panic a little and look all over the place, and there’s a newspaper box. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

The sky’s too clear. There’s no smoke. There should be smoke from the mills.

Hey, Zielinski! my boss calls again in my head. I grin and say, Yeah? I’m at the blast furnace.

So this is Pittsburgh. Do they even still have the steel mills? I look closer at the Post-Gazette. July 17, 2019.

The docs put me under in 1952.

It’s the only way. You have to, Jack, the men said. They wore white coats. We’ll come every day, they said as the cold blast hit.

Over sixty years.

I’m goddamn hungry. I see a food cart way up ahead. I start to run, but my legs wobble and I cough, so I just walk as fast as I can and pull out the wallet as I go. There’s a five.

The sign says “Hot dog $3, Sausage $5, Pop/Water $2.”

It’s ridiculous. “Seriously, a hot dog costs three bucks?”

The vendor scowls. “That a problem, buddy?”

It is, but I gotta eat. “We could’ve eaten for a week on that,” I tell him, handing over my five. “Gimme a dog and a water.”

“Whatever you say, buddy.”

I understand the cost a lot more once he hands me the bottle. It’s clear like glass but flexible, and I couldn’t break it if I tried. It must cost a fortune. I down half the bottle immediately to try to do something about that damn cough—so much for the benefits of clean air—and sit down on a low wall at the end of a little park. The dog is good and hot, but I barely taste it because I’m asking myself what I meant. We could’ve eaten for a week on that.

Who’s we?

With something in my belly I sit and think, and watch. Lotta Steeler stuff around, and a couple things of the Pirates, so that’s still the same. Lotta people in t-shirts and shorts, some in suits, that there’s a nice suit like I could never afford, that’s—

I almost spit out my water. That’s a colored guy wearing that suit. And the one in that suit, over there, is a woman. What the hell kind of a man lets his wife walk around wearing a suit?

Wife. We. I have a wife. I have a wife. And I don’t know her name.

I’m crying now. This place… what the hell is this place? A bright red hat catches my eye: “Make America Great Again.” You said it, pal. This woman pushing a stroller looks at me like she pities me, and I start to feel angry, but the stroller, that nose—Angie. My wife’s name is Angie, and—

I start running again, and my legs wobble and I cough, but I don’t care because I’ve got to find a phone booth. KE3-154. I’ve got to call KE3-154. But I can’t find a phone booth anywhere, and even if I could would they be there? I keep running and I remember Mercy Hospital. She was going to have the baby in Mercy Hospital.

I stop and I scream. “Where is Mercy Hospital!” I cough and when I catch my breath enough I scream again. “Where is Mercy Hospital!” This lady looks really afraid of me—I must look awful—but she points down the street and I run and stumble and hack up my lungs till I’m in the lobby and right up to the desk.

The receptionist points at the lady behind me and says something about a line, but I cut her off. “I need a birth record!”

“Sir! There is a line of people here…”

“I need a birth record! Angie Zielinski’s baby!”

“Sir, it is entirely inappropriate to ask for private medical information. HIPAA laws prohibit me from—”

I pound the desk. “Angie Zielinski!”

She eyes me, and then she slowly picks up what must be a phone. “One moment sir…”

While her call’s going through I look around. There’s a family sitting in some chairs, and a doctor approaching takes of his mask—her mask, it’s another goddamn woman. How did—

They wore masks. And I remember now, all of it.

Do you want to kill Angie? We don’t know what you’ve got, they said, or where it came from, the Russians maybe, but we’ve never seen anything so contagious. We know it’s already killed half your shift and the other half is locked away till they die. Cryogenic freezing sounds crazy, but if the experiment works we’ll thaw you and be standing right there with a cure. And you’ll be a hero.

It’s the only way—otherwise you’ll just keep coughing and be dead by tomorrow. You have to, Jack, the men said. They wore white coats and masks. We’ll come every day, they said as the cold blast hit.

But where were they when I woke up?

The woman behind me coughs.

I am seven, sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor,

gripping a black crayon hard enough that my knuckles turn white,

air escaping too-small lungs in desperate, ragged, gasps.

There are lines here, on this white page,

but they’re not enough,

just scattered fragments of a child’s mind,

desperately trying to form some semblance of sanity.

Tears fall across waxen lines and I’m shaking,

watching my crayon as it clatters to the floor.

Papa brushes a tear from my cheek.

We watch in silence

as its weight makes the paper buckle.

“Look,” he whispers, running gentle fingertips over waxen streaks.

I cry harder. It’s hideous, isn’t it? This mess of lines?

He only smiles, shaking his head.

“You did it, darling girl.

You told your story.

And that’s enough.”

...

You define good writing as the substance of textbooks and novels,

pretty words on high shelves that the common man cannot reach,

as if social media has somehow corrupted the written word.

And I suppose it is unsophisticated here, among flashing screens and jumbled text.

...

I’m sorry.

I’m sorry that the lack of periods

at the end of my sentences

determines the worth of my craft.

I’m sorry that this has been done before.

But the words on this page are my own.

So while you define who is good enough

to play this game of ink and agony

I will be sitting here

with a black crayon and ugly words

telling my story.