The Rail
Fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from our favorite emerging writers
No Epilogues Johnny, decades on & your returning occurs without me seeing you anywhere save in the heart, the spirit's boomerang for great love released as energy reverberant in wavelengths to hands which held, shared in that creation in the first place. Memory holds all of that as well as imagination keeping track, pacing our separate quadrants for when words are put down in love, committed to space on paper with passion that love supersedes denouements, no matter how messy or clean. Closure is no more than a rosebud then, tight in its secret scents, but still capable of unfurling: ripe spiral of petals layered connected right back down to their source. After I left, in the first months stretching on into years, their heaviness was often nightmarish as if woven of your fragrant flesh, the folds of limbs pinning, holding me in, lying on top & I having again & again to explain & convince we were no longer together, in a threesome with alcoholism, though I'd still wake as if gasping, fighting off the bed spins of being uncontrollably drunk. Even when news of your death showed up, those accidental beans spilled by an acquaintance L.P.N. bringing my father his nursing home meds, the dreams did not stop nor do I ever expect your consciousness not to pop in, occasionally coincide with mine though these visits have become more of ease, a subliminal shared joke that we both know how I am on to your tricks. You are Connie Francis again, the Connie sensation so many knew you as, half mad & hilarious with your drag's bit blowsy craft taken so seriously between the vodka - (it's scentless) - mixed with Gatorade - (it hydrates) to combat nerves of some PSTD strain for broken-into hotel rooms & hidden rapists to forever escape. They'd become terror desperately, valiantly turned again on its head with "Stupid Cupid" lyrics for where the boys were with someone waiting with no lipstick on his collar telling tales you'd have to chide with long elbow-length gloves, a gown of sparkling black taffeta & wig of equal shimmer tiara-headband held. Ah, but how you shaved everywhere for that fantasy, pulling stockings into hungry love-for-sale heels & I watched fearing for you, small boy still before his mirror lip-synching to the boxed turntable, the spell of the vinyl record whirlpool, while wanting your dreams to become real. Johnny, your beautiful medleys spot-light shine from P. Town dives still, tinsel echoes of Grizabella glamour now off-stage, & no longer dragging the need to be touched in a show-stopping torch song for you are Dorothy & the friends of, barfly by barfly, clicking the ruby slippers to at last have found yourself an Amazing Grace salvation, with mercy for the wretched, in some place like home. Gunmetal "Once one has seen God what is the remedy" Sylvia Plath Blue, chin stubble, the razor jaw at five o' clock constant even right after shaving with the roseate skin of the just awakened... This too is how a face can be superimposed, the eyes, long-set, & you now pouring through his gaze, you & he never having met at all, yet there is the resemblance in warm brown, in glints, the remembrance of somebody living only in dreams. A haunting is composite membranous stuff beyond flesh as I touch whole systems afloat through who we were. Surely you are that star there amid the wheeling gulls, & surely you are the shore where my boat is lapping the Mediterranean - you - gondolier of deep shadows steering the stillness but, centuries on, will it matter? Love, guns go off in salutes, squads & warning shots, but I have seen the face of god & it is glorious, atrocious, vast. I have been leveled, devastated, & been brought back, so what is death now to me? What is existence when I am this ever-fog? What, I ask, what? - but his chin is against mine, mouth finding mouth, & that answer is beard burns for my gun powder thoughts. The Detonator Heart It won't go off while you are waiting. One-one-thousand, two - it feels the count of your breath, outthinks your tinkering with this aorta & that valve, a handsome technique to be sure, but I am the pauses between each broadcast made by a Tokyo Rose. I am the wavelengths. I am the air waves, sonar in my stillness, the slightest ticking motion: your fingertips, your lips, the lids of your eyes----- Just blink & it could happen. Stephen Mead is an Outsider multi-media artist and writer. Since the 1990s he’s been grateful to many editors for publishing his work in print zines and eventually online. He is also grateful to have managed to keep various day jobs for the Health Insurance. Currently he is resident artist/curator for The Chroma Museum, artistic renderings of LGBTQI historical figures, organizations and allies predominantly before Stonewall, The Chroma Museum
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