"We Wither Away Whenever Yellow Is Worn"
by Justin Karcher
Autumn in the air, me and Doben sitting on the bench
in front of Matinee talking about the 48 Hour Film Festival
when Rick comes up to us and dramatically declares,
“It’s like a powder keg out here!” He’s not wrong.
Lately, the Theatre District is more unhinged
than maybe it should be. The whole city is.
When the lights go down, mouthless monologues start crawling
down the street smashing the windows of parked cars.
Everyone on edge despite what they say. How when you
take a knife and carve open a memory foam mattress,
you’ll discover a broken heart pumping out shards of glass.
Increasingly difficult to relax these days,
some winged horse always flying out of your newsfeed
with a big bag of cocaine hanging out of its mouth.
When you think you’ve turned the corner,
you suddenly blow up like a bomb.
Little pieces of who you thought you were
scattered in all directions,
each one searching for that terrible beauty
to make sense of things. An excess of love would be nice,
but our long-legged murmurs are allergic to oxytocin.
They turn into silence by sweating so much
they melt into nothing. We never know
what to say about ourselves anymore.
Just that something is off, so we keep on running.
We talk about revolution
when we should be talking about resurrection.
Because coming out of your shell isn’t the thing
you do once. It’s an everyday thing, how you interact
with the world around you. Walking the streets
and collecting all the yellow police tape you can find.
Wrapping that pain around your body from head to toe.
After leaving Matinee, I catch the caution we throw to the wind.
By the time I get back to West Delavan, I resemble a school bus
bandaged up by blotters. The selfless witching hour
when I stand in front of the abandoned apartment building
across the street from my house and stare down the graffiti.
“Rat hazard” stands out because it's tattooed twice.
I perform a striptease, classy but sensual, removing
each piece of tape like I’m becoming a new person.
Pretty soon there’s a pile of entrails at my feet
and all the windows are winking at me. In the pre-dawn hours,
the powder keg is quieting down. Victory means not losing your mind
when all signs point to yes. It means acknowledging the shitstorm
but not giving in. It means fixing what’s going on inside
and never turning a blind eye. No one should stay allergic
to the sunrise. How when you take a knife and carve up a ghost
you’ll discover all the things you wanted to say but never did.