Breadcrumb #368

OLIVIA POWERS

I help myself to you
in the morning
in my mind

Mimic the downward slope of
your throat, the pads of
your fingers
your breath

I cannot remember
your words, only the ones
I’ve repeated so often
they come back in
my own voice

Round like from the end of
an empty toilet paper tube
held up to
my mouth, then up to
my eye, slicing life into a circle

I like it like that
A clean picture
Smooth edges
Cardboard cutting crisp
into the soft skin around
my eye

I can feel the boundaries
thrown, then
four inches out, like
a shadow puppet to the wall

I can turn my head and
redraw the frame, sand the corners
from a fresh picture and never see
the shavings fall.

• • •

Breadcrumb #367

MADELEINE HARRINGTON

News of a Walmart reached Eaton, Ohio when Kathy was still only a lump of spineless tissue, hiccupping and floating blissfully inside her mother’s swollen belly. Kathy’s mother was alone at the kitchen table, sipping coffee and reveling in the house’s rare and fleeting silence, her husband at work and her children on the bus to school when she discovered the front page article in the Eaton Local News. Her mother rested the newspaper across the shelf her midsection had formed and cupped her hands over her mouth as she read the headline aloud to her unborn daughter.

    Later that month, the entire town of Eaton crowded the once-barren strip center to cheer on the ribbon cutting. Kathy’s parents had woken her siblings up early and driven their 2004 Ford the six miles downtown. By then, Kathy’s mother was so large she needed a wheelchair. The mayor spoke, the ribbon was cut, and Kathy began to swim towards an exit. She hadn’t been due for another three weeks. The ambulance that drove away from the Walmart towards Eaton County Hospital was the only vehicle on the other side of the road that afternoon for miles. The newspaper clipping of the grand opening was framed and hung in Kathy’s house above the living room mantle and next to a sepia-toned photo of Kathy’s great-grandparents. Kathy’s mother liked that the event had coincided with Kathy’s birth and as a child, Kathy was delighted as well. She had pretended the mayor and the ribbons were there for her. Yet as time wore on exhaustively, Kathy began to resent it, to try over and over and fail, to forget it.

“The mayor spoke, the ribbon was cut, and Kathy began to swim towards an exit.”

    When Kathy was seven, she was caught stealing candy at the checkout aisle. Lumpy bags of gummy bears and starburst slid out from beneath her purple dress as the teenage cashier and her horrified mother looked on. Kathy stood unflinching, too terrified to acknowledge the bags that leaned against her ankles. The teenage cashier seemed indifferent but Kathy’s mother was mortified, and on the way back to the car and locked in her room that night with no TV and no dessert, Kathy could feel the weight of her mother’s disappointment for the first time. It was a heaviness and an anger that had been handed down for generations within their family, and Kathy felt it more the older she grew, equally in her mother’s scolding and in her silence, until one day, before Kathy could realize what was happening, the feeling had become her own. She would feel it within her and throughout the far corners of Dayton, weighing down every resident, like the final relentless days of a long drought.

    Kathy was hired to restock aisles when she was 17. There was no formal interview, just a casual chat with the manager, who gave her a speech about the hardships of adulthood and put his hand on her shoulder. To celebrate, Kathy and her friends drank Smirnoff from the bottle on the school playground. They pushed each other on the swings, daring to go faster, to fly farther, until most of them were left throwing up all over the playground’s soggy wood chips.

    Sid and Kathy met later that year. Sid was hired to work in the electronics section, to show customers which iPhone was best for them even though he couldn’t afford one himself. Sid spoke minimally and had a gut that was often visible between his khaki pants and blue polo, but he remembered Kathy’s favorite songs and bought her yellow carnations, so within weeks they were kissing and grabbing for each other’s body parts in the storage room on breaks. Sometimes Kathy would grab his penis and mold it with her fingers like playdough, and she’d watch the alien expression in his face as he struggled to steady himself against the shelves of staplers and post-it notes behind him.

    Kathy attended classes at the community college one town over, but they were so crowded that it made it hard to hear the professor. Sid dropped her off and picked her up because Kathy didn’t have her own car, and sometimes he’d be an hour or two late because he had to work an extra shift, or simply because he had forgotten. Kathy would sit on the curb of the parking lot waiting for him, watching the sun set across infinite miles of browning suburban lawns while eating peanut butter and jelly sandwich that had been flattened by her fingerprints. During those evenings, Kathy found herself fighting boredom but also another feeling, something less understandable yet even more palpable. As the dust turned to darkness and night surrounded her, she slumped forward with heaviness.

    When Kathy was promoted, she stopped attending classes. Her manager had told her the news with one hand resting on her back, and had complimented her on the fine young woman she was becoming. Kathy told Sid and her family that she didn’t think college was for her, and they didn’t argue against it. Kathy had a second cousin who had moved to New York City to study art, but Kathy’s mother would roll her eyes whenever her name was mentioned at family dinners. It was something about dating a man twice her age or dating a black man, Kathy could never remember which. She taught herself to roll her eyes too, yet when her bedroom door was shut and the lights turned off, she’d shut her eyes and think about living in a house next to the Empire State Building.

• • •

Breadcrumb #366

ALLYN FAENZA

“The children are hiding.” I am greeted as a trusted family friend would be, and that is when I start my hunt. Usually the hunt is over in one glance toward the kitchen counter where two pairs of eyes are veiled by two sets of teeny hands. Tonight is one of those nights. 

    I play along like any respectable babysitter would and search under the cabinets and in the fridge, but really I can hardly wait for hide-and-seek to end to start the clock. We have twenty minutes until 7-2-0 otherwise known as the children’s bedtime. 

    I announce my presence with tickling, implore Piper and Ryder to kiss their parents goodbye. Then the script I have been rehearsing in my head on my walk from the subway to their apartment can be spoken aloud. We resume from last week’s performance. 

    The door closes behind their parents and the home alarm is set. I am ushered to the couch and the scene commences:

    How can we help you today?

    I have ________ (insert PG-rated disease or condition I have been brainstorming to avoid repeats, i.e.. butterflies in my stomach, an eyelash in my eye, the flu, arms that won’t stop stretching).

    Oh, we can help you with that. Ryder, let’s get the _______ (insert ridiculous cure, i.e. butterfly pump, water wash, flu shot, arm X-ray). 

    They run away to their supply (coat) closet and back.

    We got the cure! You’re all taken care of. You should stay overnight. Now, here’s some chehwee sywwup to sleep.

“We only have time for five or six diseases and cures until I send them to their bedrooms to pick out books and brush teeth.”

    Again to the closet and back to me on the couch.

    Here’s wehmon sywwup to wake you up. Feel better?

    Yes, I’m much better! 

    Good. How can we help you today?

    We only have time for five or six diseases and cures until I send them to their bedrooms to pick out books and brush teeth. On the way up the staircase, relief sets in. 

    Little do they know that a few days ago I had surgery to retrieve 22 eggs from my ovaries. After unexpected complications that left me bedridden with fluid covering my lungs, this is my first time out of my apartment. These are the only doctors I feel safe around right now. Truly I have been healed by make-believe syrup and an imaginary water wash. Renewed like a baptized sinner.

• • •

Breadcrumb #365

BRIAN SHEFFIELD

Only the prettiest flower
may cut itself out, let fall
its head, that hydra.

Only the prettiest flower
may let down its hair,
that fireball of petals,

to paint on the earth
a memory of water
or a thought of dark clay.

The children of Jocaste
buried their feet
in the plastic soil of

of a world that was
already too busy
turning dying myths into

the prettiest flowers.

• • •     • • •

Breadcrumb #364

SERGIO SATÉLITE

I

Problematic Moment
This is a no-fly zone:
I descend, take my wings off
I place them in my backpack
And I behold the fork on the road.

Both roads are what happens
Once everything has ended.
The question is where to go from there.
Moral assessments are made.
Social consequences will follow.

One road says Silence
And the other one doesn’t.

I scratch my beard
And all of its hairs fall off to the ground.
My African hairs pierce the ground like high-tech snakes.
They go into the soil of things
And a truth tree without leaves is born.
A truth tree only with branches,
Many branches.
I’m alone on this encrucijada.

My shadow has a shadow of its own in my heart.
My shadow came first in my evolutionary calvary.
My shadow doesn’t argue, she pulls.

I’m thinking.

The elephant in the room
Grows fat and impatient.
The elephant in the room
Steps on my body
And I am flattened.

I am now a bumper sticker:
Your choices behind the wheel matter
I keep saying.

II

Deliberating Moment
I sit down on the universal toilet
Waiting to unflatten myself.
I close my windows against voyeurs.
I peel off my banana and I begin to sweat.

The idea behind choice is to see
How each road leads where
And then to look around to see
If your heart is somewhere there.

Representatives from each path
And from subpaths within paths
Come to me with pens, special brownies
And papers to sign
They want me to put my name
On places and moments
That are neither here nor now
And I take their brownies
And I make paper planes
With their futuristic contracts
And then I ghost them...
...Unable to know...what to say... 

III

Inconclusive Moment
There’s an octopus on my face.
How it got here
The same can be asked of my face
And of this damn fork on the road.

Well, I’m blind and still somewhat flat
But I have a knife in my boot
Sharp enough for foreign tentacles
So I try to cut off its limbs
And each time I cut off its tentacles
Its testicles grow right out again.

Well, I have a lighter, so I try to burn
The octopus inside his brain
But the octopus is covering my eyes
So I fail again and again
Until I give up and I pull out a bowl
And I have a few puffs
And the octopus says hey man
Can I have some?
And I say can you get off my eyes?
And the octopus says of course man
You just had to ask.

The octopus is wise.
He’s seen much.
We finish smoking.

Now though there’s no oxytocin
Though my dopamine is limited
And my glucocorticoids are restless
I’m still on the road
With better vision
Fully unflattened
And ready to choose.

I don’t want to choose.
But I must:
My heart on the other side
Is waiting with the Self it wants
And I can’t use my wings.

• • •