femme.

Charly Huston had the lofty and faintly antiquated air of a woman who was used to getting what she wanted with a glance.

The storm washed her into my office on a Wednesday afternoon: a vision in a long, vintage, ermine-lined trench-coat speckled dark at the edges beyond the wingspan of her incongruously cheap nylon parasol. Outside, the clouds beat a tattoo, shifting relentlessly as they exorcised a deluge of summertime ennui onto the winking pavements.

She wasted no time. By the time I'd stood and offered to take her coat, it was already draped across the chair, as if the royal-blue Stella Gardot gown and jewels beneath it had been itching for hours to emerge from their heavy poplin cocoon. The color worked nicely with her eyes; above them, deftly-coiffured auburn waves rippled with intentionality, barely brushing her shoulders at the slightest movement of her head.

Her ripe-strawberry lips hung in the kind of half-pout that must have got results every time.

"Mr. Dodge," she said. The words pirouetted elegantly upward, trembled, and vanished like cigarette smoke. "I've heard you were the best in town." Her body and voice moved with impeccable synchronization. "And I need the best."

She looked like money and determination - things I liked in a dame.

gold.

For years, every morning
you rose before dawn to the urgent alarm
of the dreams you refused to defer,
a jaw-clenching race against sunrise you won
with a groggy insistence, to swallow again
the bittersweet pill of the grueling routine,
routine,
routine,
routine.

Time's shown that focus and fear are not foes,
but cooperate, honing your will
with the iron-soft skill of a potter,
to take and embrace
every step of this painful endeavor.

The prize was a journey of thousands of moments
of miniscule milestones, rote repetitions,
the hanging of hopes
and the failures of fantasies,
meets that meant missing the movies,
the gut-churning trials of trials.

—The camera's turned toward you now,
the way that your subconscious sometimes imagined it:
those fleeting moments when scenes lingered lucid
before the unkind interruptions that jolted
your sixteen-ton eyelids apart
with the wrench of an unyielding schedule.

The sounds, too, are new.
It's more than the quiet approval
you're used to,
the echoing claps from the half-empty stands,
the back pats and high fives,
the wet-eyed exuberance
glowing from coaches and parents
and teammates back home
in some galaxy long, long ago, far away—

They're here, still, but now
every sound has been drowned
by the crowd.

They've read out the numbers and everything's bright.
The whole world's a dancing mosaic of light.

And you think to yourself, as you think on the past
while the smile on your face holds unshakably fast,
as the breathing returns and the aches dissipate
and they're playing a song that your heart resonates,
as you think of the agony, anger, and fear,
the bleak disappointments and frustrated tears,
the social diversions you couldn't afford,
the practices void of apparent reward—
you visit unglamorous chapters untold
as nations, transfixed, watch your story unfold:
deterred but determined, beleaguered and broken
but bold—

You've mined through the minutes
and sifted the hours
and struck gold.

fate.

I'm just trying to figure out
what I'm supposed to do,
assuming destiny.

It drums a soft cadence
with the drip-dripping echoes
of passions, persuasions, and fleeting ambitions,
puddling somewhere in the cavernous black,
lapping at my toes like tremulous waves
as I walk into the darkness.

rush.

She runs, though the flames, enormous as they are, seem to merely amble.

From time to time, they release a violent yawn-roar, as though freshly awakened from a lengthy winter’s hibernation – followed often by the crashing surrender of another building unfortunate enough to lie in the fire’s indiscriminate path.

The fear is cold despite the heat of the vibrating air. Sweat fogs her vision as she grapples with her hair, pulling it back and frantically twisting a strip of fabric to hold it there. Her normally deft fingers shake as she fights to tie the simplest knot – fails, curses – starts again.

All the while she still runs, every pounding step jolting out of sync with her frantic heartbeat.

She knows she is bleeding, but doesn’t feel the pain where it comes from.

The streets are filled with loud noises – cries, screams, shouts, shots, and sirens – but she is focused on avoiding the debris: wood, glass, bodies, metal, more metal. 

This was once a street lamp; this, a restaurant sign; this, perhaps a car door—distinctions grow increasingly unimportant. Categories of identification are subconsciously reduced. Everything is an obstruction, measured by levels of manageability in a fleeting haze.

She wipes her eyes and lowers her gaze toward feet whipping back and forth. She realizes after a moment that they belong to her.

Against the conflagration, the stark silhouettes of structural remnants become twisting, oppressive cast iron shards, a leering grin illuminated.

She dodges something that is ablaze and moving, and then remembers to breathe – instantly regrets it, as she inhales a lungful of smoke. She coughs violently, tastes the faintest flavor of warm blood.

Like the black engulfing the city, her mind chokes on ambiguity: nothing is quite certain, nothing is quite reliable, nothing is quite true.

Except that she must run.

narcissus.

Decay is chapters we can't skip,
dense, unpleasant, tedious:

I doodle in the margins
of the brighter pages.

enchanted.

The camping lantern sitting on my pickup indicates a broad circle of light, combating the dimmer shadows cast by the moon's insistent white glow. The trees are sparse here. The sun had sunk earlier into the furthest end of this field, which is now an impressionist sketch in dark blues and greens and flickering luminescent shades.

Her hands fly up to swat, meander through the humid August air, and come to rest in the grass next to mine.

"Mosquitoes are the worst," she says passionately. "It's not even funny. I get these huge welts, see." She points with a grimace to a sizable redness on her calf. "It's so gross. I hate bug spray, though. I should have brought one of those, like, candles."

"You could wear pants," I suggest.

Her laugh is quick, almost reflexive; her smile, wide and infectious. Especially right now, with a strand of hair falling in front of it that she doesn't bother to brush away just yet. ("Right? Let me just go grab the extra pair I keep in my purse.") One easy toss of her head in the other direction and it's all good.

I reach up into a plastic bag sprawled in the back of the pickup. "This is the best thing ever for itching. No lie," I say as I toss her a bottle of aloe vera gel, half-used from treating sunburned shoulders over the past week out here.

She wrinkles her nose in bemused caution, then looks up at stars that twinkle back in the dark pools of her eyes. "I'll take your word for it." She flips open the cap.

The fireflies sparkle in tempo with her breathing. Around us, the evening trembles with a gentle warmth, undercutting the heavy summer heat.

monument.

--but by God! What a miracle! What a colossal testament to the might and the mightiness of mankind, he thought excitedly, his neck strained as far backward as it could go, in a futile attempt to scale the thing with his eyes. The union of scientific majesty and man's infinite creative instinct, the pinnacle of man's potential--

He breathed in sharply, tasting the brightness of a crisp dew-flecked morning.

A thousand rays of light glinted off the metallic walls that wound through the clouds, winking eyes that burned with pride and a heady promise. They had spoken once, at its inception, of piercing the foundations of heaven itself. Who need concern themselves now with the dim, archaic pettiness of allegory?

His head spun with an intoxicating gilded euphoria, while the continuous belt of solemn-eyed slaves, laden with woven baskets of bitumen, rolled ever onward and upward in a dwindling spiral.

This, indeed, was glory, if ever glory could be seen: to harness the monolithic force of man united, invincible, exercising unstoppable dominion over the very universe.

surrender.

You cradle it with firm hands and stand where the lake nibbles eddies beneath your toes in the gritty New England mud.

The only way to know, now, if it will endure, is to let fly the expectation of unassailable assurance.

The freshwater breeze capers in your lungs in tandem with the choir of a blackbird tree. Your pulse thunders as you stretch and kneel, delicately capitulating to the insistent pull. You've brought it where it belongs.

You look at it for a moment, and wonder at the new emptiness in the hollow of your palms.

Turning, you haul the heavy cedar of your boat from a bed of flattened reeds and wet soil. The sun looks small today, you think, as you drift away from the shore, away from the stolid pines and the tranquil hum of mayflies, and a startling coolness envelops your feet as they rake the water's surface.

avalanche.

I drop to the ground and sit against a wall and just breathe, counting each inhale, exhale, like I’m doing reps.

I can’t figure out whether I'm about to laugh or cry. I feel more ready to cry, actually, a whole ocean of tears pawing at the space behind my eyes. But it’s not shock or sadness, or anger or happiness, either. It’s richer. Maybe it is shock. It’s just an overwhelming feeling. 

Feeling. So I know that I can feel. That’s enough for me, for now.

Another breath. Another glorious healthy compression of my lungs. Another one, and another one, and another one.

Well, I’m crying now. Bawling my eyes out. I couldn’t really say why except – maybe I’m thankful, yes, that’s it, so heart-burstingly thankful for everything.

Thankful for the sunlight. For solid ground. For being able to remember being six at the swingset. For the taste of sizzling bacon. For laughter and movies and music and the beach. For my family. For my friends. For the fact that I have time to spend and people I want to spend it with.

Thankful for the look on her face as she turned to me in those final moments with her eyes half open from behind the tubes, her hand draped around mine in the strongest grip she could muster. Like she was saying “go get ‘em, bud,” like she did with an encouraging smile when I used to hover on the sidelines, too shy to join the other boys in their pickup soccer games; or the early mornings when she'd dropped me off before debate tournaments; or at graduation, when she'd found me in those brief crazy minutes before I walked.

I’m not sad, I don’t think. Or maybe this is really sadness. I don’t know and I can’t try to figure it out right now. Everything’s so vividly bright and everything hurts at once. Doing reps, in and out.

But I’ve known this would happen for a long time and I’ve imagined what it would feel like, and it’s not supposed to be like this.  It’s not supposed to be heaving sobs and tears that won't give up jostling their way down your face, drenching your sleeves and making a mockery of the twenty-three years you've spent learning to "man up."

Feelings are so hard to understand until they tumble over you like an avalanche and crush you to the bone with the miraculous agony of…well, of being able to feel.

aurora.

Terror and tragedy
have become instant,
accessible. From where I sit
in a comfortable chair,
I conjure shocking vignettes
with a button.

Grief, pain, and horror
come coursing through chips,
wires and optic-thread cables,
translated to binary babble,
then burst into headlines
that hang over images
weary with frozen tableaus
that depict, yet again,
the sheer madness of men.

I press a hand to my mouth.
--Meanwhile, somewhere are people
that shake, overtaken
by slow recognition
of severance, growing
aware that the voices
that chattered adrenaline
only two hours ago
will not rejoin them -
voices imprisoned
in cold cells of memory,
each by a bullet
of deafening senselessness.

I ache with aches
never mine to begin with:
aching for fathers
and mothers and colleagues
and children and cousins
and friends
whose whole lives
in an instant
were ripped into pieces,
whose fixing will never
patch over the emptiness.

I burn with helplessness,
creeping paralysis
coursing my veins
from this twenty-first century
cultural consequence:
flash information
on more than I'll ever
be able to process
in seconds and moments
on pages of pixels.

Death weaves its way
through the chips and the cables,
demanding awareness
of all it's accomplished:
Your time has not come yet
but everyone's must.
We will sip at the cup
that makes dust into dust.

All I can do is recall
that the God who seized hold
of that cup,
drank it down to its dregs
for a scandalous love,
is a God who can weep
at the grave of a friend.

And so, from my desk,
as I watch time unfold
with the flames and the tremors
of groaning creation --
as I wonder sometimes
if it's really all in His hands, --
I'll mourn with the mourning,
be love to my neighbor,
and cling to the promise of sunlight
that comes with the morning
that must be approaching.

cover.

The sidewalk is a catwalk
for the beautiful people

and as I pass, it is to me
as though our inequality
inflates and baits their self-esteem
and I exist to be the foil
to fuel their confidence.

I say it does not bother me
although my downward gaze
and hastened pace -
and how I seize my lower lip
between my teeth -
belie my insecurity.

dénouement.

At the exact fraction of the nanosecond the sniper's bullet kissed the fabric of his shirt, he was seventeen again and standing in the crowd, devouring the pulsating theatrics of grinning uniforms marching past voluptuous red-lipped nurses, so certain that the world of this Technicolor pill delivered release from his own white-washed suburban acedia.

When the fabric sighed and gave way and the metal murmured against bare skin, he was embracing her in a jungle sweat, whispering "always" even as he knew their worlds were lifetimes and oceans apart and he would forget her name tomorrow, though the fire would remain to scratch and scar with cinder claws in the dead heat of future nights.

As the skin burned and surrendered its first tears, dark and rich as sunset wine, he was holding the child who wore his eyes, the way they had been, blue and bright, before cynicism had dimmed their vibrancy, before the echoing cries of the twitching damned had fettered questions to his faith and fostered a bitter wonder if anyone or anything truly saw each sparrow fall.

Tendon, artery, tissue, and bone made no struggle against the intruder, but not until the cardiac muscle throbbed out its final faithful iteration did he snap vividly back to now, fully present in the last moment of temporal existence, gasping out one searing breath that tore his despondency into jagged strips before the dark.