1.
REMEMBER WHEN you stung like a bee, leaving your ink all over the kitchen floor and the orchids in the kitchen window never seemed to notice how drab the sun had become over the years? It makes no sense. All languages die in the gap. So, don’t speak. There’s no reason to give voice to our discontents. We are driving and the bridge is a snake crossing the snaking water ways. I became possessed with your hand on the back of my neck. I know you by the smell of lavender and tea. Don’t blink. Never blink again. We have all the time there ever was.
5.
WE GO to the coast. There is nothing. Dead sea and dead trees and dead jellyfish and dead yelps of dead seagulls floating like ghosts in the salty wind. We throw crumbs to the birds, the crumbs of our pandemic colored lives. They swallow them the way I swallow you in.
It is hot, a southern heat, full of meanness even here. And somewhere the ozone is coming apart and the forest is burning and a child dies with it’s mouth tied around its mother’s sagging and empty breast.
We hang our long shadows.
Mercy killings.
7.
LATER, WE go hunting for hotdogs and cheese. No one here can breathe. Our hands tremble with claustrophobia and sweat in the produce aisle. The mangos and onions still have blood on them. My dreams are the labels on mayonnaise jars.
3.
IT’S RAINING again. The city’s sewers vomit into the streets. Mosquitoes like hell. A cockroach floats on a parking ticket. We could fuck in the rot. We could fuck on a bed of rifles. We could fuck until there is nothing left to eat or drink or fuck.
2.
WE WANDER aimlessly. Having someplace to be. No one remembers where or what and the dead are only a generation away from being forgotten. And everyone is dead, filling up every conceivable space with their dead already grins. The whole city is a corpse like a dead deer picked over by vultures and crows. Meat sweats in every window.
My mother calls. Smalltalk. She says I should talk to my sister.
I ask her who my sister is.
4.
IT’S JULY. There are armed fly-overs and armed police. They call it patriotism, blue lines and red lines. But I don’t see any lines at all. Fascism smells like funnel cake on days like these. The gun on my hip digs in, digs in deeper, digs like an ant. I don’t mind. There’s nothing down there, nowhere to hide. We hide in each other, like young squirrels. I have your hand to cover me. And your knife. That’s how it is. The world is a knife wound. Yet, here we are, full of it, so full we could scream from the tips of our spines and crumble like Walls of Jericho, crumble like crabs in the bay. If we die tonight a cascade of tears from a handful of mourners getting caught in the milk.
6.
SUMMER IS a time of zombies. Even the pigs beg the grackles. Some breeze brings the stench of it, black mess, cellophane and concrete. Death by department store. Death by convenience. Death by strip mall. Death by mesquite and drainage ditches. Death that goes on living clock tick by clock tick. Death by cop. Death by Black hole. Death measured in Facebook comments.
18.
THIS IS me traveling like a meteor back to childhood. Hurtling like a madman. It’s kindergarten. The ‘strongman’ in the class is a boy named BJ. He is strong because he can do six pullups on the jungle gym bars. The girls are already watching him. I am sick in another part of the playground. A girl has beaten me up while my friend Mathew watched. Her name is Rhonda. Her father and my father are in the same squadron. We both live in the same section of enlisted housing. It’s a cinder block wasteland painted in strange pastels. Our dads are away in the Philippines, or the Indian Ocean, or circling off the coast of Beirut like hyenas. I don’t know Mathew’s father. He doesn’t laugh. He is as afraid and ashamed as I am.
Later we play “jet fighters” on the swings, zooming past each other, trying to mimic the sounds of 20 millimeter canons. Mathew has fallen backward out of his jet fighter. He lies on the tarmac unable to breath. I land safely and go for help. In the principle’s office they ask me what happened. I tell them we were on a routine combat mission against targets in the north. We took ground fire. He went down behind enemy lines. They send me back to Mrs. Ross’ kindergarten classroom. No one notices me. No one knows I’m a hero.
My father called the conflict in Vietnam a Police Action. Years later I would realize there are no heroes. There never were.
8.
IT’S 1967. My dad works capping bottles in the Coca-Cola plant on First Street. He takes his break on the back loading dock, smokes two cigarettes, drinks a warm Pepsi. His draft notice has arrived. His mother throws it in the kitchen trash. She won’t send another son to war. Her eldest came back from Korea a hero with a Silver Star and the finger bones of a Chinese soldier in a matchbox. He would rattle the box in his ear and whisper the word “home”. My dad finds the draft notice in the trash after his shift. The next day he enlists in the Navy. By 1968 he is afraid.
10.
THE CITY is a black dime. I’m dying. As slow and still as ice. My heart ticks strangely, uneasily. I feel the dip in my respiration like a pulse of light somewhere at the back of my skull. The doctors say it’s nothing. Eat less salt. I’m a pillar of salt stuck in the armpit of a continent. It’s a black dime and I’m a black death. A shadow among reeds. And I haven’t even hit my deductible yet.
9.
YOU WENT to Mexico with the Phantom of the Opera. You brought back a clutch of benzos and a baggie full of un-stepped on opioids. At the border a pig snuck a clip at your porn tits and cut you loose with the reminder to bring a goddamn birth certificate next time. Being an American is being a joke without a punchline. No one laughs. They sharpen their knives. Other Americans carve crosses in their bullet heads. Nothing is real. I swallow an ativan and three quarters of a two mill zanzibar to burn out the edges. I forget how to not speak in tongues. I forget that my window is down. When I tell you I love you it sounds like a rusty lag squeaking loose in the steel girders of the last legged Bay Bridge. We throw the keys to the savage parade into the dark gravity below. Shit and water and mercury catfish. One day we’ll burn the banks and buy tomatoes and bread with goodwill.
But for now, the fog, booby trapped with potholes.
11.
GOD OR Posadas, save us.
13.
DOWNTOWN. YOU pull a sour jar from between your legs. Make like you were pulling the pin on a grenade and lobbed it at a pig on a bicycle. The piss pig screams, thinks it’s bleach, thinks he’s blind. His partner is a photocopy. The photocopy draws his heat and sends two rounds hot. The rear window explodes and you take one in the throat. The other goes wild, clips a houseless in the knee cap. The photocopy lays it heavy on his pig piss partner and puts another under his chin. Teeth pop out the top of his head. The photocopy sacks out on the spot. Obituaries to follow.
I ask if you’re ok. You say you’re all choked up.
Profit the dead with blood and lead, I say with a wink.
You wink back and whistle through the hole in your throat.
12.
WE MINGLE at the courthouse standing around a trash can fire. Janet “from another planet” has another baby in the chamber. Klaus, an old German that hears voices, said he’s received a communique from the aliens. He says it’s almost time. Richard asks what happened to your neck. You tell him a pig put one in you. He asks if it hurts. Nah, you tell him, nothing much hurts any more. Everyone nods in agreement at that. Profit the dead, someone says. You whistle a tune from your bullet hole. Someone joins in with a harmonica. Klaus listens closely. Janet starts to sing. She was an angel, many would say afterward. The Angel of Lipan Street, they called her. No one knows who lit the first fire that burned down the courthouse.
15.
IT’S STAGE 4 November and there is no cure. My father is in a hospital bed watching a basketball game in the living room. He is fed a slop every few hours through a tube in his abdomen and smokes cigarettes through the hole in his neck. Then he takes an IV dose of morphine and dies just a little bit - just enough. He wakes a couple hours later. I tell him he gets better smack than I ever did. He smiles, pops a fentanyl lollipop in his mouth and writes on his small screen, who’s the junkie now? There is death on him. There is death on him and it looks like a hospital blanket. That night he cooked a pork loin dinner that he couldn’t eat for everyone. I couldn’t look at him and eat. I went to the low edges at the dark waters of the lake. I ate alone there next to the boathouse. When I came back to the house he was nodded out again and dinner had been replaced by the smell of shit. I lean into his ear. I tell him secret things. I tell him soon the pain will end. I tell him he is not alone. This lie is the last thing I ever told my father. A week later the flames turned his fragile body to dust.
14.
ON THE third day we attack the police station and burn it down. The Xerox paper pigs dump a few mags and run flaming for the bay. Four of us die that night, never to die again. All the knots are untied. Some hang jewelry from their wounds. We crack open the jail and hand out shotguns in the park. You look like a saint in the muzzle flashes. Every moment is holy now. Ain’t no death left. We’ve become haints haunting the alleys and barrios.
17.
THE CITY is a black dime and we, with our red wounds, our too-late wounds, are a black death, a swarm of locusts choked by ash. Too late maybe, but not late enough to ever waste another moment dying.
19.
ON THE tenth day we burn the banks and make guillotines in our own image.
16.
I SHOULD’VE told my father forever doesn’t last.
20.
SAINTS ALL. But, there are no prayers for us, no songs, no gods, no masters. The city is a black dime that goes on and on and on, stretching toward the next city, the next dime as black as this night, and haunted by haints like us, armed and mean, undead and undying and never going back. Never going back.
Only through.
Anupam Roy, from Land of Resistance
