Stillbirth

by M. Doebel

The clutter of this half-town is

clustered like it’s living, maybe dying.

It is enough to swell the nausea,

this sunlight on the paint of cars,

beams the color of

“it’s always raining on Sunday”

except when it’s not.

It is 2 o’ clock and the warping

is waiting to launch an offensive.

Somewhere, something happens,

but the work and the lull and the thrums

are too moderate to make the event viable

to behold.

The unease is syllogistic,

an undefined fraction of a lifetime

has been spent knowing

that if I can make it ‘til dark

I will have survived a Cold War between

numbness and nervousness

(they collide and create a positive: nonsense).

This is a time when mortality is not frightening,

when even a close-range shot would have me convinced

that the barely-sensation

shooting up legs from steps, in,

out,

never around the same house

would drone on endlessly anyway.

I am implying yes or no questions in the sign language

of distressed hands through hair and over browbones

and every little thing chimes in with

“yeah, I don’t know, maybe, not probably,

could be, we were always bluffing about simplicity”.

I am only seeing this city

because it happens to reside between here and there

and it’s rubbing the last of the thrill of the journey off of me

(your enthrallment was silly anyway,

I tell myself,

I insist,

I yell,

I weep, dryly).

The magic things are no longer sentimental to me,

I cannot for the life of me remember the rawness of awe

that tumbles from the same images over and again,

someone should have taught me what would be poisonous

(because it is still not clear to me what is reverse-stitching my comfort blankets).

Some people wake early just to watch the sunrise,

but to me it looks increasingly like a stillbirth.