Breadcrumb #463

PAUL SUNDBERG

The Sidewalk is impossibly narrow, walkable only by one, or two in single file, or me and a dog on a long leash, and the sort of cat that follows freely for a while just to irritate that leashed dog.

But, it’s suburbia and no one was ever supposed to walk on it really - everyone driving or being driven - the concrete ribbon meant only to lift to just the right height the wheels of lawn-mowers dutifully driven on late Saturday mornings, or to stabilize the Monday through Friday afternoon wheels of the tricycle driving toddlers (honestly, no one could wait to drive) watching for the big kids to get off the bus.

It was rolled out in the early Sixties, after all, when walking was reserved for hallways and aisles and the people who sadly, hopelessly careened through their driven lives in big cities. And even there, when late in the decade the marches came, the marchers took to the streets and highways, leaving the sidewalks to white men standing behind badges, and lenses, and the times.

As I walk the concrete ribbon now I think of it as an artifact of a world long gone, a memorial to the men who cut its course, set it forms, and poured a new world into being - this suburbia. Each embedded pebble a drop of sweat, a buck earned and penny saved in the hope of a lawn-mower of their own and a child on a tricycle.

The roots of trees have raised the sidewalk’s edge. Torn the ribbon jagged - it trips me into paying attention to the blade gouged lawns, the children in the street pedaling, dodging cars driving to and from the city, and the fractured fragments of the impossibly wide suburban dream once so neatly tied up with concrete ribbons.

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Breadcrumb #454

CRAIG KITE

A

My shoulder pops when I rotate it. Also my grandmother is dying again. Last time she almost died her house burned down. She just laughed then and described what a soul looks like. My mother always calls me when death is singing shrill and I come down to see my Noni leak a little more out of her tired body. She is still alive and tries to look beautiful with a plastic tube slid down her throat. But her eyes say something in between I love you all, now please let me leave, &, Oh god, I’m scared. What’s going to happen to me? Some days I can’t remember my name. I named her Noni before I could spell my own name. It was a mispronunciation of the Italian word Nona. She tries to smile pretty. I brush her hair from her forehead and kiss her. She used to drive a school bus for handicapped kids. I could listen to her talk to me for hours. I never even had to say a word. It felt like a real grownup conversation. Now we crowd around the hospital room trying to lift her spirit, either toward heaven or the will to live. Her throat is sore and she can’t say my name now. I can’t tell if she remembers it. They had to resuscitate her yesterday. She was probably moments away. She wakes up and winces and I wince. 

My mother is a trooper. She’s paints the cabinets cherry. She paints the cabinets white. She paints the smoke show in my mind. She makes me move the furniture. Everything is a matter of fact built on distraction from the inevitable. She is stronger than I hope to be when I watch her die one day. My older brother is more financially stable than me. I’m better at focusing. I can beat him at arm wrestling.  Except I can’t. But I’m taller than him. 

In reality, I take much longer this year to respond when my mother texts that Noni is dying again. I don’t buy a bus ticket immediately. I am hiding in New York and tell my girlfriend I’ll go for the funeral. Or I’ll call mom tomorrow. I am just like my father, wanting to believe my presence is more trouble than help. My shoulder pops when I open my internet browser. I’m already worried about arthritis. 

B

Today Brett Kavanaugh’s seat on the Supreme Court was confirmed. Also my grandmother died. I’m not sure which is stranger, life or death. I’m not pro-life. When people die we say they pass away. When I was younger my body passed over the railroad tracks that run through Queens, New York and it was an adventure. Today my body passed under them a few blocks from my apartment and it was mundane. One day my ghost will pass straight through them. I’ll walk through walls whenever I want to scare a two-year old. My grandmother’s ghost would never do that. She was the personification of a hummingbird. There were always hummingbirds sipping sugar water from the feeders she put out around her house on Hummingbird Lane. She had figurines of hummingbirds collecting dust on every piece of furniture she owned and now nobody wants these nicknacks. Tylenol was Tomynol. She said words wrong but I liked hers better. She was the most racially tolerant and progressive of all the old folks in my family. And once when my mom asked her as child what would happen if a white and a black person had a baby, grandma said it’d come come out like a zebra. She was super good at Super Mario. Now there’s a fire behind my face and my scalp is all tingly. I still can’t cry but I feel out of my body early. And that is because I’m staring at her corpse.

• • •

Breadcrumb #431

SERGIO SATÉLITE

Motivation waits for me
with a cold glass of water.
I split my blue pills into breadcrumbs.
I cannot pray. So I drink.

Mine is a kind of voluptuous self-consumption
with its quasi-predictable-dance
between stimulus and response.
I drift. I float in my wishy-washy déjà vu-ing.
Too often, I seem unable to change.

A gunfight breaks out in the ship of Theseus.
17 against 25. God dies in the helicopter.
Purpose plummets with a hole in its temple.
And I. I Alone. Escape to tell you the news.

You fooled me once. Shame on you.
I fool me every day. Year after year.
Until your mother’s mustache gets sweaty.
What then? Long, hot showers? Is there a “beyond-the-circles”?

Why do we keep delaying putting away our ninja turtles?
Re-committing to Proust? Fixing the Venezuelan economy
and growing into the philosopher-kings our teenage versions
once fashioned for ourselves out of AM-radio-theologies?

Somebody has to go down on the Statue of Liberty.
Somebody has to perform open-mic surgery on this baby, baby.
Somebody has to plug the world back
into this drooling, dissociative unit.
Don’t you understand, Steven?
Somebody has to kill the babysitter.

• • •

Breadcrumb #294

MERCY TULLIS-BUKHARI

When we shared a medium fries from McD’s
a couple of years into our puberty, we walked
through Crotona Park past the swimming pool,
crack vials, and cracked walkways. Tall trees
created our separated space. You tossed the
empty red McD envelope and held my hand
with playful care. Your hands, so soft that I fell;
you led me to a scratched bench. We sat, smelling
the chlorine and hearing the children from the pool.

You had dreams.
I had fantasies.
You wanted to be a seed carried away;
I told you I was this bench.

We are young, you said. Maybe you thought you
would take this bench since I thought I would
pan fry the bird destined to carry you away. Then
it happened. Your lips tasted like biting into a ripe
Southern Bronx peach. My arms hugged your neck,
your mouth hugged my breath. The strings of our
pubertal energies danced between the branches
above us. How long did we kiss?

• • •

Breadcrumb #270

SOPHIE MURPHY

synthetically
my world was realised,
restrained projections
projections forbidden entirely,
a passive approach with the mildest anticipation like a dash of salt to season the
boiling water and whatever the starch it comes into contact with. but salt in water
seasons the rice
[just one pinch!] well,
well,
well better than any other seasoning and that is true, irrefutable. locked down,
and in, and padlocked again, QUIETISM only reveals pseudo problems so I shall
proceed:

there exists someone [spiralling into a maelstrom of Insanity] I’m tethering, I feel
its spikes
they are soft
[Leibniz agrees!]
I see now that crazy people wear socks, boils and crusty bits unrealised. I never
knew they wore socks I only saw sandalled crazies. open-toe- open-mind- open-
to-demise no size mind can predict its appeal. why do we touch cacti when we
know the consequence? some do some don’t
Insanity glistens
it swoons and you touch its membrane. it cuts Again! it cuts some and it cuts only
those who touch it, and always both parties but never neither

it is funny
[i am human]
don’t destroy my internality with your external assessment solidifying false
quantifiers Leibniz would happily dispute which doubles back into my cognitive
fluid and flows to every crevice (in every possible world), osmosis of normality -
some parts are saltier than others - before any meniscus is decided upon
those parts dip into the hot spring of CRAZINESS and they like it sometimes so
they keep their toe their until it requires a hospital - not hospitable! oh no no no
foot so RAVISHED could assist a body {~[(matter) its (mass)]}

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