Claim Your Space

Noel Kalenian

Through the windows the boy's voice like a fog tremored the gargoyle's vision with the peculiar sensation of living on different heights at once. He was all walls, so panicked in his quandary of sight.

I didn't do it, I didn't know it, I didn't kill it, I'm to kill, I killed myself. So it was and will be, all snapped wings and those voices. One flash is all he got. The house radiated orange all over his end in moments. After all the end owns us, we own it, we urge it and love it. He had bouts of screaming or sobbing periodically, of asking the earth a question. Why do you assemble these shapes I can't fathom?

Her apron hung on the breeze from the shed aluminum. Stripped down stockcar in the side yard, oil rags and greasy bricks. She wiped her hands on her pants felt her bones ache in her thin arms and flew away. Couldn't quite stand it, a piece of her old quilting wrapped around a bucket seat and the only show on Channel 3 a Formula One race. Let go the apron string and let the weariness lift her like a ride, straight on to no there. How she rose so lovely in her waitress uniform, cheekbone piqued by a one-sided smile and one last cigarette glowing from her fingers. Underneath he imploded like a black hole star as he stroked the lonely. The boys and girls in slow brigades delighted in that radiance.

Some kids grope the sky for one last glimpse of the waitress angel. Others put their ears to the ground and listen for the grim ones.

The plants will bloom with menace. "Yes," they whisper up through water, where certain children can decipher gurgling brooks, or wave in the palms of trees, quivering with delight from the roots on up.

Because some children are enemies of the sun. They hide from light's clamor and knock the life from drums and earth and rhythm their mole eyes beyond the gates. Some eyes focus on the cigarette sun and some hear the thump of children swinging underground.

The clanging shutter all that empty and the boys gathered on the ugly like a gate. Pushing off and laughing. Girls bleeding softly. The winter of a whisper. Make your bed now lie in its bones. Issues lovely from her. She stands up a river. Bones and monocled, she can see so far up close. The world in daffodils. The universe in crow wings. In cricket teeth. She pets the small shapes. She makes some room to sit inside the space between the threads of feathers. She draws graffiti they can lie in. They open up and lie within. They each take a flight on a rounded curve of letters and slip like a wester. They all know nothing but their nothing throbs and grows. Bustles lively. They dance on their hats and whistle the night an assemblage of the deepest waterfall faces into one another.