Charles Freelandfrom Bad Luck Mériméei. The circle stops three quarters of the way to completion, other wards in New Orleans with similar geometry housing soul and ghost. They dissolve into cane brake and loose sand. Echoes might cease here as well or make their professional debut using tape recorders to capture their encounters. No one is certain. I check my watch. It has stopped trying to juggle raising its twin daughters and there are no batteries which might return the county’s tallest title from neck to underarm to groin. I step into the scrub and sand where the circle has terminated and expect immediately to be surrounded by stinging insects and interrupted vistas. Those who line the horizon, who would meet once a week outside class to discuss Ceromitia mitrata, barely alter their appearance. Someone is waving from the other side. I think. It is hard to tell because, as of the census of 2013 there were 402 people living there. A disembodied fear appears like the Kenan Visiting Writer researching in Ulvshale or a fighter jet buzzing low over your picnic. I am practiced at neutralizing it, hunting on the ground for ovulids or false cowries, after all those years of family members jumping from the shadows to startle me, to introduce me to yet another member of the Isosceles Club, and, of course, that stint in prison. ii. The train whistle a final declaration of faith as preface sounds like naked pink and newborn young choking on their own emotions, the beef offal or chicken added as part of a one-year agreement. It is a sound like someone’s lover newly come from the Zero Point border station calculating literacy rates and the ultimate armchair ride with genuine consequences for those who hear it, who stumble endowed with superior memory and a weaker form of the Urdu virus from the tavern to the streets to the cul-de-sac where the households all use archaic spellings for the word “weasel” and are some of the most frequent targets of artillery. The magnetite nearby can disrupt navigational compasses, landing you in the wrong bed. The owner whispers creeping vole-like conspiracies in his sleep, pursuing tax evaders through a castle and a palace on top of a mountain. My hands have no hair on them. Not simian, but porcelain and I am embarrassed. I try to hide them beneath Byzantine linens but I need my hands to perform certain functions like turning doorknobs and handling the jewelry the man studying Euclid while working in his uncle’s bank tries to sell me whenever he sees me. Earrings with bright emerald variations like the skin of a dragon with Finnish as its mother-tongue, the thin tin rings hammered out in the town two counties over with the modest outsider’s gallery at the center and the faint aroma of slaughtered hogs. iii. All tunnels on the north border terminate at Pony Canyon allowing the police time to train their hounds installed lengthwise within the frame. They shore up the popularity of swamp music increasing their resolve, a show of defiance and love. We throw rocks displacing 5th vertebra from the highest properties and districts listed as pre-Portuguese, outcroppings, skeletal remains selectively binding and purifying the target organisms until they fall harmlessly to earth like paper airplanes, all but those destined to shatter a quartet of Mihael Stroj’s genre works and three hothouse panes. Explosive plumes of steam transform your poignant interview, transferred by deed or will, into the likeness of a bald man whose loose bolts were able to escape inspection and then dissipate from the scalp down. There is nothing left but the bitter scent of marigolds and travertine pools, the last great castrato roles and a cackling from the east. Appointed one of the arbiters, I incorporate the sounds revolving around the fallout rate of a given funnel. They arrive there ahead of me just the same and stake out their optional histories otherwise unremarkable, space in the shadows between the escalator and an arcade of native oak, the statue of Marcus Aurelius with scarlet and green Mardi Gras beads draped about its throat. Time to re-assess the value of dreams, to write up my dear ones and searchlight, to cut down on the vandalism, if nothing else. Announce the daughters of prominent socialists from Lomza and the space-time-space conversions and rounding errors of the sort that originate in polite compliments and childhood mischief at the strip mall, and terminate in the faerie ether become the very vault and regular edition of myth, of bridge abutments with Venus on them, someone’s ugly widow. Charles Freeland lives in Dayton, Ohio. His website is The Fossil Record (charlesfreelandpoetry.blogspot.com).previous page     contents     next page
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