Yellow Nebula

I’m okay. I’m okay. Alright, back off already. You’ve told me now.

Give me some sp… 

She’s… 

Wait.

She’s… what? Dead?

Right. Yeah… got it, thanks for that, can’t wait to return the favour. 

No, no, I don’t need any—

Water? Sure. 

Hold on, wait. She’s dead? I must not’ve heard you right.

Uh-huh. Okay. I’m all ears.

You already told me, I get it. You’re just saying the same words over. I’m…

What the fuck. What’s happening here? 

Are you for real? Are you for fucking real?

What? What? 

Seriously, what?

Of course, yes, I’m sorry, yes. I’ll calm down. 

This is our home. You know that. Behind all this yellow tape and drama. 

Where is my wife?

No, no, no, no, no…

Why do you keep telling me this? Are you lying to me?

Let me go inside. I’ll find Emily. She’s in bed. Asleep. It’s late.

All these lights and all this shit outside my home is starting to—

Okay, everyone leave now. Now, I said. Get the fuck away from my house.

No, I won’t calm down. I won’t turn around. This is invasive, and you should be asham—

What the actual fuck is this? Not sure why you’re up in my face. I said no, I won’t turn around. 

Wait. Are you trying to cuff me? 

Not funny, dude. Not subtle. Is this a bad movie?

Okay, I’m chill. Don’t freak out. Give me a sec.

I’m freaked out. We’re the victims here. Me and Emily and baby Grace. What about that don’t you get? 

There’s a whole life happening inside that home if you’d just leave me alone and let me go inside and pretend this night never happened. 

None of it happened. That’s it. Never. I goddamned pinky swear.

You might not even be real. I might not even be real. A woman’s bad dream about her husband and her daughter.

If not, please tell me what I left for her still dripping on the kitchen counter.

D’you have any idea? Know the things we shared? Made together? Fought over?

Anyone here felt what it is to be clutched by a passing nebula with madness in its blackhole core? To be ripped from bliss and blasted into nothingness?

Thought not.

Do any of you even know how hard all this is?

Huh. Surprise me, bro. Asswipe. Come at me, dipshit. 

If I grabbed your gun right now, I’d fucking show you, fucking show everyone.

No, that’s absolutely not a threat. You’re hurting me, stop, don’t make me do this, just let—

________

Image of Smimm's infinite eye © Rebecca Loranger

Window

“Heal, heal, little frog’s tail

If you don’t heal today, you’ll heal tomorrow.”

*

These are life’s moments sans frames.

Uncle Fred loans him his classic convertible for the day. Tyrell revels in the breezes of the city, even if they’re redolent of asphalt and bitumen. He feels his maleness distilled. He imagines a simpler time, a world of clean skies and sullied earth, of bright busy crowds and dirty, scheming besuited men and acid women leaking betrayal.

His smile is a midsummer signal. 

When he hears the brief yelp of the siren, the sun at its noonday apex, he’s so honey-sated pollinated and sure he isn’t speeding that his guard is down. 

There’s a shadow at his window ’bout to fall across his whole life.

“Hello, officer. How can I help you, my dude?”

“Hands on the fucking wheel! Now!”

We don’t need to see it; we’ve already seen it. Some mother will see her son’s last moments on some stranger’s body camera.

***

“They didn’t take his life; they took the rest of his life.” 

“What’s the difference?”

“I just like accuracy.”

***

Through a smeared window, I watched her. She stared ahead, at a wall. The wall had some old school swirly design in red that I can’t describe, and probably has a name, yet it stayed with me, this moment, this scene, her yellow hair around her architectural shoulders, her still eyes, a room smoky with age and all the mundane moments it had held.

A choice came to me. Leave now and this would dissipate, or go in and rewire destiny.

I went in.

***

It’s an eye. An eye isn’t a window to anything. It looks out not in. If it offends, pluck it out. Be my guest. Take that razor and slice, my Andalusian dog.

Let’s get biblical and trade. Leave the whole world blind.

For the sake of the sacred and the profane, please, obliterate the pane.

*

“Sana, sana, colita de rana

Si no sanas hoy, sanaras manana.”

______________________

Image © David Humphrey

The House Carpenter

“When a woman gets in trouble, everybody throw her down.” — Robert Johnson

“It’s about a woman in trouble.” — David Lynch

_____________________

Tumbling, stuttering, a guttural stammering. Coyote in the dark hills yammering. These are the finish lines we contrive when we are cruel. When we dam the staggered voices of the anguished.

“Somebody died here tonight. A terrible killing. Let me clean the ground.”

(Shirley and Jamie carved in a tree,

M-I-S-S-I-N-G.

First comes dread, then comes malice,

Then comes the fruit of the poison chalice.)

“No time. Let it pass.”

Hot liquid days. Blessings, our daemon English hearts ablaze.  

Death in the bike lanes. Death in the bay. A kindness, unacknowledged.

You’ve seen her tight to her shadow, pulled in like shellfish, fussed over and fingered by the matriarch. Don’t assume that’s all she is. Don’t. Oh, she waits. Bides her time. But take a breath or two, sit tight, hang fire, her killing time is coming.

“I need to do this.”

“Two people die every second. Give it up.” 

How is it you stumble on trouble every day? You are a slavering bat with your sonar tuned to strife. 

You’re in the West End, the water beyond the palms placid as a cataract. Driftwood logs punctuate the beach. In daylight everything is green; at night we’re all cetacean. You ask a gull why pain exists. A shadow transits the sun, your momentary skin a-flinch, volatile like waves. The gull only laughs, glimpsing and rebutting its own ephemeral ghost.

It’s a single second plucked from all the generous seconds offered us.

Are we to be returned to the manufacturer? Is this our fate as hosts?

The man in your house is wrong and strange. The quieting of night makes you wait.

He spreads all his tools and his face won’t ever change.

Why are the times you least feel like talking always the ones you need to most?

_______________

Image © Viktor Jakovlev

Atrocity

Love, regardless.

Not only ghosts but people. Even the ones who faded. 

Recall delivering letters amid narrow ice-filthed brick-shored places, breath a whorl of futile, fingers iced, eyeing gun-shy frown-marked dogs, brown and surly with an inkling to hurt.

A battalion of believers moaning surety. True balloons. Obliterated grooms. How does your compliance make them come? 

“Let Jesus in; I promise you’ll be saved.”

This place amid the human tribe is crushing, our tracheatic wheeze an outlier where birdsong once prevailed.

Policeman. Copper. Sworn to protect. 

Ever hard.

You crossed paths with her and thought it better to erase her path. 

Such unmitigated hubris.

Not only the path but every step she took upon it. 

You read that map, you read each step, you nightmare godforsaken failed reptilian fuck.

“I can’t even bring myself to trust a cop, so why choose Jesus as my guide?”

We don’t want this to grow into a poem by default, so listen, pay attention. Reinforce this. You’re weak and low and appalling, and you always will be. Worthless, I want to say, but what we lack we boost, reshape into what we can hardly tolerate.

How glorious our acts of charity, how unrehearsed. Make this our cenotaph. Our radical, ramshackle, gimcrack tribute.

“What the almighty fuck is a Jesus?”

No longer will I turn away from cataclysm, especially when it’s made, especially once the red-streak gaze, the blaze of shame, the razor-face of naked blame spans the climb and ropes the bleating escapee, coveting exoneration, floating jailbreak, tempting everlasting flight.

Oh baby bird. 

You darling fledgling underneath the rain.

“Will you come back at last and hold my trembling hand?”

What untenable schemes unravel and bring you face to face with all things lacking face? What untrammeled endless waterways remain and even drain beyond this thing we deign absentia? 

Claim this. Claim your phantom legacy of pain. Let’s not let the boorish blamelords block the meritful petition of the rest.

“I’ll come back. Yes. Whenever I am right, I promise I’ll come back.”

Avenge this, all my dearest compañeros, walk in numbers shouldered by the highways as they flit and dash, reminding them of how our multitudes will some day trounce their flimsy hold, how sheer exuberance will rout their angry grasp, how dreamscapes wake from sleep, how such astonished love surprises overreach, how this damn good thing eclipses all of this and most of that.

____

Image © Rebecca Loranger

The Thing That Happened

Glaring into a sunburst windshield, she follows the fiercest of sunsets into town and holes up in the Indigo Motel heedless of the glances and scowls she spurns from strangers. She is a boy who looks like a girl or or a girl who looks like a boy, and though others seem to, she hardly gives a fuck.

This is only her fourth night of separation from the thing that happened. 

Charleigh. Charleigh is her name. When she clicks the grubby remote to figure out the TV, she sees on the grainy screen that the last four occupants had watched the same porn—creepy daughter incest shit—and she wishes she’d grabbed a sleeping bag. In the end, she lays the unrolled towels from the bathroom over the bed cover and sleeps that way, wondering if the towels themselves are clean.

But she knows nothing is ever clean, and that’s a thing we must learn early, before our innocence goes. 

***

Outside, in the brightness of morning, a man sings badly but lustily by the roadside, a troubadour of dust. Charleigh has barely climbed from her dreams, but she knows enough to know the man sings to no other.

“What a terrible thing it is to be.

Where are the birds, the bees, 

The butterflies, the bats?

I hope you know, because I sure don’t see

Where all them critters are at.”

Here’s what it’s like to love someone: every grain of dust on an otherwise mundane trail stays with you, becomes part of a constellation which then becomes a zodiac; each individual birdcall, the slats on a boardwalk, the rising melody of a mutual song, a precious scene from a film, are sonatas in a greater work. The way someone stirs their coffee. Shadows on a wall the shade of a Tuscan sundown. The arch of a brow, the mad inhalation, the bestowal, the grateful burden. All of it.

***

The thing that happened was a killing. It began with Charleigh saying, “Each time I have to ask for help diminishes me” and ended with a sacrifice. Which reckless god or goddess, or what spirit of caprice, demands such? 

Simplicity is always a lie. No thing is simple. She keeps a journal she began the first time shadows transited the flickering sun of her life. She opens it at random:

“The wine stem held aloft, a burgundy shadow on your chest like a bloodstain, or the cowl of arousal, your blessed stung lips barely parted, yet I imagine the honey of your breath.”

Riches. Charleigh has always dreamed of riches, of fulfilment on every level, each bold strata, of hunger and thirst and want and yen and itch. 

Murder is that rarity: bleak and empty yet bright as diamonds, scorched of all warmth yet compelling as a frozen bleep unlit across the black immensities.

The accelerant? A quarrel.

“As God is my witness…” 

“Funny, that. Your god is a being of pure eternal love… yet if you don't stop displeasing him he is going to fuck up your entire existence."

From that to violence and an ending. Her eyes in this dry place are dry now, but tears still tumble somewhere, like reels on a slot machine, waiting to ring up three of anything.

***

Out in a rainy field and the earth is shimmering. All so drenched even the crows have sheltered. A brightness in the pewter canopy, training its muted glory on a single human figure crawling amid the stalks. Crawling though its jellied skull is mostly shambles.

Ω 

Image © Rebecca Loranger