Glass

With my pinky finger bleeding, Russia disappears, just as expected. It isn’t bad. I take out my little black notebook that I keep on my person to record observations. I rub my knuckle on the slide and slip on a cover. I dot myself with India ink. It spreads through my eyes. “A million, million million, million million million cells,” is what I read and then climb onto the white-graveled roof to watch the eclipse through a shoebox. It does not arrive like a liquid dart piercing the closer sky and inverting its imago on foil glued to the rear. It does not arrive. I stare through the lunar windows instead, into a kitchen where a black and white television plays and no one is cooking. Life, on those other planets in the book the faceless European lady gave to me, might be possible. Brownian motion is what makes the soul afraid of itself. It’s hard to go on much further from here.

Theodore Worozbyt has published three books, The Dauber Wings (Dream Horse Press, 2006) and Letters of Transit, winner of the Juniper Prize (The University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), and Smaller Than Death (Knut House Press, 2015). The City of Leaving and Forgetting, his most recent chapbook, appears in Country Music.