Member-only story
Prose Poem
Five Easy Pieces
Prose poem
Sleep is a remote destination. Suitcases chatter in the overhead; drivers in the cockpit. Two short men, round, with hunch-backs and fingers like sausages — men who speak in strange scraping tongues and accept cash from lonely figures standing below bus shelters, who only want to get where they are going.
The old city spreads herself on the bed, waiting on another young poet to enter with dreams of taking her away; she runs a dirty finger up her grey leg where the swollen river criss-crosses like a varicose vein. A public servant comes twice a week to empty out the bedpan onto the street below, now and then, splashing the shoe of some salaryman who files past, too tired or too broken to look up and notice the sky covered with purple bruises.
Inside the stone catherdal, one thousand candles burning; one thousand prayers pending. Christ casting a cold gaze from the cross, half-naked himself. A veil of frost settles on the bald heads seated in pews, with hands in pockets, counting copper coins. The clack of my heels as I left echoed in the lofty ceiling close to the ear of God.
A group of homeless seals asleep on the courthouse steps. One of them, the older one, dreams of a secret beach, a small cove protected by two bearded cliffs, sun on his skin, white sand, and clear, crisp…
