Tyler King
Monorail
Nothing can kill me, I spin the chamber
once,click, twice,
click, dial tone, your voice
on the phone is deafening, the
screen is ripe with
blood and this is a gift, violence
I don’t have to
pay for, I catch the last bus
and there is a woman crying,
and there is a man crying, too
and this is also a gift, the aimless
grief of a stranger, the interior of
devastation made loud and
obvious, the chime of a
clock grown
feral with
longing, maybe you won’t wake
up today, maybe you’ll dream
of war and tell your mother
you need to come home
for a few days, we’re still cleaning the
broken glass, complaining about
the landlord, I wish you could write
about something else, but
my blood has sung enough
about home to know
when getting high is the last
exit off a highway, the night is long,
the night is so long I can see
my whole body in it, and no way
out, sleep is a letter
with no return address, in your
infinite mercy,you strike
a match instead
Tyler King is an emerging writer whose work has appeared in Sonder Midwest. He lives in Dayton, Ohio, where he is a student at Sinclair Community College.
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