Last night I went to bed to the voice of Bolaño, Romantic as ever. He said even mediocre writers felt the “sombra del ecstasis” of Rimbaud. What a skinny young degenerate king, hair spiking all the way into our hearts like blades! My phone buzzed out a name I haven’t said since I was 17. He sent a text. We decided to meet. He lived in an abandoned warehouse, really he was a squatter. We climbed a rickety ladder, slid open a wood panel and crawled into the room where he hid, slept, and dreamed. He had really made that “puesta total.” I saw the insulation yellow and pink and raw stuffed in the cracks in the walls. He still didn’t have a mattress or a bed. It was monk-like, this existence. It was like Luscious Skin living on a rooftop in Mexico City. Even asleep, the longing was unbearable, such pressure under my sternum and that inability to move or speak. My naked legs were so sleek beneath his on that splintery floor. When I woke up it was 6 am, still dark. He was probably asleep in the town where we met. His wife would be awake tending to their kids, kind of annoyed. I started to think of his work, laying carpet on other people’s floors. I started to think of his mind, what mania snakes through it. He will probably not vote. He doesn’t buy that wild fantasy, democracy, and even in his domesticity, even without a word, he can live like a poet, mediocre like me, but still, didn’t he write out EAGLES FLY with rocks on the sunlit path winding through the woods under the dancing shadows of the leaves when we were falling in love?
Brittany Ober is an English teacher and mom by day and a philosophy student and poet by night. Her poetry has been published in Gutter Eloquence, Ample Remains, The Aurora Journal, and Words & Whispers.
Main Squeeze Literary Journal 