World Made Flesh, and Some Nights, It Gets So Dark

by Brent Canle

art: "Solaris" by Juan José Clemente 

World Made Flesh

We woke this morning to find that the world was made of flesh. Skin covered everything. Freckles stained the sidewalk. Cars weave between pores in the road. The skyscraper’s windows were the milky membrane of blind eyes. 

In the buildings, at work, we entered veins and all day rushed around into different orifices having meetings, completing tasks, meeting deadlines. The streets below us pulsed as buses exhaled into the coming night air. I wanted to scream but found I couldn’t. Or maybe I had been all along. The streetlights lit the tips of their abdomens. Guns popped in the distance like pimples. 

On the TV, a memory, we watched as a meat plane fell from the sky, crashing into the soft ground. Time bled out. I could feel the pain felt. A pain that gets collected and processed and stored somewhere far far away from here. Knowing, we tread more lightly.

*****

Some Nights It Gets So Dark

I don’t know if I’ve gone blind or if light decided to stop existing. 

As I feel my way through the streets, my other senses become stronger. I can smell all the heartbeats in the building above me. The heat of each foot shuffling along area rugs on each floor. Water coming to a boil. A young hand writes a love letter with the address empty. The words are so pungent they offend. I pick up my pace. I have to getaway. 

A few blocks down, an eldery man weeps. From high up, I can taste his old tears. The bass from his hollow chest is overripe and saccharine. I am so proud of him. 

Behind it all there is a long whisper drawn out. I think it is the darkness itself. “Please,” it says through crooked teeth like a balloon slowly letting out all its air

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