A little black vase sits on my shelf. Armed with one daisy drinking ceaseless water. Infinite oceans of salt. My grandmother hid her tactics in its well. The soft-drink spite she gave to her daughter. The way she conducted chain of custody on prized family possessions.
Love is a scattering flock of birds. A herd of antelope divided by the lioness. Love is teams and sides and schism. The way we go opposite one another.
They say irrational love is the greatest inventor because it concocts reasons it can work. And reasons it can fail. Thomas Edison was first a lover. Henry Ford was first a lover. All great men know they are lovers first and all else last.
It grows nimbus in size. But never crowds. That’s how you know it belongs. It can remain. Uninvited though it may be. The way a cat kneads a thigh. Nuzzles a chest. Yawns like air.
All this keeps me here. Stolid. You live in my head and bones. I never push very hard. I do not venture. I roll on my side and look. Lift my paw into the air. Playful like a big cat. I swipe at nothing because strength does not rush. Does not give chase. It knows in good time and about gardens planted in night’s carnival sky.
Moonbeam rain makes the plants grow at night after the sky has settled. When the lidded brash sun is down and the sky has pulled her nightmare covers. Sheets pour outward. The sky at night is soil. The stars are seedlings.
we share
atoms
so we
might
as well
share
words.
You reach me effortlessly. Like a brook shooing water along its course. You seek me steadfastly. Like a camel crossing desert step-by-step.
Running across vast plains your hand raises beneath me, breaking earth, and scoops me against your shoulder. I lodge my teeth there. Insert all desire. I am a thousand space shuttles launching into the black sky. Hot propulsion and trajectories. Sweating palms.
You say you don’t need me. I tell you you have forgotten what it is to need. Present day mythologies of women educate you it is wrong to need me while I blitz my hand through the air like a curtain and make it clear I am a man. Fallible at best. Falling to the ground. I stand naked. For you. Embarrassed. For you. All this I give to you. My pride. Which is everything.
I wish you to know me the way I know you. But I do not wish you to carry these rocks or this cage of flightless birds. I do not beg you to do for me when there is so much to do for you. Granted. Gifted. Yes. Yes yes yes yes…
Love. You’re right that I need it. You’re right that it’s blinding and that I am afraid like a beached sailor looking back at the sea. Send your storms on odyssey. Send your Argonauts to bring me home. While I run into the waves and vanish. Over and over I am coughed on your shores. Over and over I am broken on rocks. Over and over I swallow sand and shells.
All this inside a black vase with a softly whispering flower. All this gentle sipping. Tidy cabinetry and tidal force. Clutched in rhythm. Our hands. You smile to me. Wordless. Needle pulling thread. Follow me. You whisper.
I look through the roof: the moon is a sandbox. Distant: a boy made of teacups and kettles squats and pulls a tractor over handmade dunes. Tells longer tales to dreams made into cubicles and mathematical expressions.
He sits still long enough because he is waiting for the licking waves to make it all go away. Waiting to rend into particulate.
My mother is tired. So tired. Of reneging on affirmations and sworn oaths. Held in the black vase. Feeble and porcelain. My mother is tired so tired of living in peril. Chanceless. I feel the energy of chancelessness. I feel the platitude of despair that hangs like black crows.
A flower. Softly. Drinking softly.
She pushes me against the shelf. Breaking splintering wood snapped strong. Aggression pours out the vents and black oil sheets down walls washed white, yellowed by nicotine. Fear bored into drywall. Kept in deep wells. Crashed on the ground.
The vase is broken.
I am unsure if I care. Trying to decide what it means. But pain is meaningless. Not inert. Meaningless. Carries on seagull wings to the next beach-goer, to the next trash dump, the thousand cardinal infinities.
All my motion is tied to my foot and pinned to the ground. Nothing remains because the ocean is spilled on the floor and the flower is done drinking and the currents and riptides and Argonauts and sailor are all soaking into the carpet and running to the cracks where the linoleum meets soggy walls.
This is the point to mirrors because they reflect the places we’ve been, the selves we cannot rightly see. This is the point of her. She is a flame more deeply seated beneath my irons. I cannot help but burn because she is kindling. And stoking. And air.
Carbon crust. Earth core and myriad prisms. Like doorways inside and in the fractal broken glass of the vase now lost to the shaggy carpet. Shards of black ice dust are broken everywhere like comet tails. Off to make contact with a distant lifeform.
Sight. In seeing her I see myself. My mirror which gives me a frame of reference because I am staring out over the bank to the sea to the seagull and a bottle washes against the shore. Gets. Stuck there.
It is black. A vase. I collect it in my hands. Turn it over. Watch the horizon. Carefully.
Roman Newell is hard at work on his debut novel — 20XX — a work in magical realism, which explores the complexities and conflicts in modern day societies amid confusing social norms, rapidly evolving technology, and impact traumas. Follow Roman’s Substack to be added to the 20XX contact list.
“But pain is meaningless. Not inert. Meaningless.”
I’ve read this piece a few times, but every time I return to it I find something new to latch onto. To ponder and place somewhere in my life. This is the kind of writing I want to read all the time — the kind I purpose to produce when I’m flowing and in the zone. The kind of writing that reverberates — fiction or non- — that keeps its readers.