No foreigner storming invasion but a hero lost from a bedtime telling of immemorial nights, wandered from a page: he stands as if a pixel, a lone pix fixed at the drawbridge’s lip — a drawbridge, a moat, each flattened, flat, smooth the page, Reload.
To enter through the portcullis withdrawing, through its portal … (this is where I write from now — Dear Mom, cc: The End — I must have fainted).
I wake in a square, undressed but tended. My bruising beginning to subside. And in its stead, a glow fanning through me, as if the opening rose of health, as if vigor.
The town is a setting of lithic streets and alleys, the houses themselves logged of dilapidated wood — but lived in, not neglected, textured.
Nobody is around — no presences I sense directly — but I feel, I prickle as I feel — these floatings, these passings.
A brush of hair or a gusting sway, as if the skirt of the wind blowing by me, blushing up my cheeks. A skin’s prick to horripilate the wrist, a nail’s graze or a lovemark left by teeth. As I begin — this is how I begin — gradually, after days, a week, to see.
Everywhere — as if enclosed, as if my life’s been flattened up against the seething surface of my eye — everywhere I look soon there are women, there are girls.
I see them, by seeing through them. Their beings projected onto every surface, on every ceiling and floor and sky, projecting across every window and alley’s curve, across and as every doorway’s gracious waist — the walls, visible through them in wrinkle crack and cellulite chip, in spall and score and peeling paint, temporarily aging them in their revenance. But then they float again, they pass again — eidola of posturing plank, with glints of screwy smiles — their youth preserved only in their motion.
Girls throughout alight and nude, or not nude but purified, thoroughly pristinated as I proceed — through the statics of climate — to recognize: Natashka one and another from that vid with the Cuban I think and yet another from a schoolyard seduction and still another from the bucked back of a moving truck and a girl I recall her name too, I think Masha, Sasha, Svetlana (trans. luminance) — and they are themselves but aren’t, as they were both onscreen and you have to guess in life itself, but not.
You can speak to them but there’s no indication, Mom, that they can hear you and certainly they can’t speak to me, Mom, not yet — if they did then in what language?
You go to touch and you touch right through them. Snug a breast and end up feeling up a boulder, flick a lip and end rubbing tongue against a sill.
They just hover, Mom, amongst their daily tasks — gathering water they won’t drink, steaming suppers they cannot eat, but I can.
I am sustained, they take good care, don’t worry.
I’ve even stopped asking after Moc.
I’m sure, one day, I’ll notice her appearance. As a shadow’s missing features. As faced light thrown across a wall that is not home’s.
Your message has been sent.
My message has been sent.
Links
_________________
Emission
abajournal.com/news/article/paralegal_sues_over_herpes_web_post/
McDonald’s
mcdonalds.com/us/en/food.html
The College Borough
pdfhost.focus.nps.gov/docs/NHLS/Text/79001603.pdf
Sent
iafd.com/person.rme/perfid=RRosenberg/gender=m/Robert-Rosenberg.htm
About the Author
Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in New Jersey. He is the author of five previous books, including Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto, A Heaven of Others, and Witz. His nonfiction has appeared in Bookforum, the Forward, Harper’s Magazine, the New York Times, and other publications. He lives in New York City.
Book design by Ann Sudmeier. Composition by BookMobile Design and Publishing Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free 30 percent postconsumer wastepaper.