CL Bledsoe
Blinking
Always, a camera pointed behind him.
Always, a crack to slip through.
When he comes out the other side, he won’t be able to hear
how bad everything is for everyone back there
anymore.
It’s something he was taught
to ignore.
He was taught he was the noise
that keeps everything aloft. If he stops staring straight ahead
for even a moment, the horizon will fall.
But he’s beginning to think it’s someone else keeping it up.
They are yelling and they are yelling and that is a form
of trying
and they are saying he needs to go outside and measure
the exact distance from sound to action, from water to concussion
grenade to oil to death. This is why everything glows,
they say.
It’s because the smolder is too expensive to extinguish.
He will go.
He will see if this thing they can’t spell is true.
And when he sees his name already carved into a stone
all he will know is how far it is to get back home.
This is how the night feels: like a nurse
with two hours to go in her shift. The night needs sensible shoes,
everyone to shut up and do what they’re told when someone
who knows speaks.
There is a list which accuses her of having a name, of trying.
She knows the best thing about ears is how easily lies flutter
into them.
They blink on and off and on and off.
This is the language of hope, sped up to match the seasons.
CL Bledsoe is the author of sixteen books, most recently the poetry collection Trashcans in Love (lulu.com, 2017) and the flash fiction collection Ray’s Sea World (lulu.com, 2017). He lives in northern Virginia with his daughter and blogs at NotAnotherTVDad.blogspot.com.
SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.
Click here to visit our Kickstarter campaign, help us produce our 2018 list, and claim your reward!