In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Flash, and: South Lorain Suite, and: The Future
  • Bruce Weigl (bio)

Flash

And with the tanned and lovely sergeant I watched the upper half of a peasant man convulse in the dust, the lower half blown away by a two-hundred-fifty-pound American bomb the Viet Cong had rigged into a booby trap. The concussion rattled my teeth and my brain. I couldn’t stop watching. For a long time, no one moved. I couldn’t lift my foot to take a single step. I was flushed, soaked with sweat, swooning in the movements of the dying man. [End Page 130]

I thought that if I died too, somehow, I would be released from the waves of sickness that rolled over me, but the sergeant saw something like a pale curtain come over my face: already my eyes rolling back in my head and my knees giving way to the stinking power of someone else’s death, right before my eyes, so he grabbed my arm and shook me back to where I needed to be to go on. It don’t mean a thing, he said, and we turned back to the trees, and their safe shadows, and cool.

South Lorain Suite

I

Slag is the word is the air is the color that stains the houses and the cars yellow is the smell you don’t forget the grit you breathe every day. Slag is not a song is not a metaphor or symbol. Slag is what’s left when the steel’s made and dumped in piles by the river. Slag is ballast is passageway is hillside of our imaginings is the black mask of a father’s face is the inner being of things.

II

On my way to school I stopped at Fatty’s Bar and Grille and watched the policemen place their bets, so blue [End Page 131] their uniforms that I was drunk with happiness to be with them. Shot and a beer I learned there, and the drowsy numbness of summer afternoons, lost to vague desires. Those men were our fathers but not in heaven; they lined the bars when the shift was done and drank their paychecks to smithereens. I remember the mother’s voice like a candle in the pitch night, flickering, calling him home from the street to supper and the doorway of our long shadows.

III

Men were free then to grab and take as they pleased the little boys and girls of the neighborhood before we had a language to tell the story; before anyone believed the story because the fathers hid it and the mothers and the teachers and priests, then one day you look up and the sky is completely different, and has taken you somewhere completely different, so you let go of their hands and their mouths and their eyes that tried to pin you down. You let go, and you rise up to what feels like a warm current, taking you away.

IV

Rock me awake the trains in the roundhouse, the voices of trainmen cutting through night sky like birds to my open window. Everything waited to be known beyond the walls of our lonely apartment, [End Page 132] and I had to hold on to keep from spinning off the world and be sucked into blue-black space. There once was a time when kind giants ruled the world, and protected you, and came home. I don’t know how to say that I lived in the twilight then, where dark wings beat my sky to death.

The Future

In the future they won’t know me or see my smiling face so they’ll have only the words to go by. I wish I could have made a better impression. They might want to look down into the tunnel of our skulls to see if some light shone there once,

or they might want to shake those bones and toss them into a dusty circle where they might say something about who we were and what we were afraid to imagine.

So to the future people I send my best regards and my gratitude for having taken over just...

pdf

Share