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Prose poetry by
Sean Lovelace
Test for Deconstruction IX by Mario Sánchez Nevado
Apology # 3
Red-tailed hawks over the Mississippi. On real estate billboards. Golden Arches. They watch the highway shoulders all day. How do you hunt something already dead? I leave that one to you, to that house in Indiana, that bed of sighs. I remember a long night, on hands and knees, as we searched for the baby’s pink shoe; and the whole time I’m thinking: out there someone is making love; kneeling in a pew; flinging a plate into a wall; is clutching the hand of a loved one, as they lay broken. Can this be real? The last payphone on planet Earth stands baffled at a truck stop outside Memphis, Tennessee. I mostly sleep well now, I do. Now that our bones have been positively identified. I’m sorry.
It’s not so hard to find a young lady who will share a hotel room and cocaine in Chicago. To wake in the morning, on the floor. With the El clattering outside, with a pigeon ruffling and cooing at the windowsill. “Flying rats,” she says, as she shrugs on her purple bra. “They brought a bunch of hawks downtown to kill them.” The sunlight as intricate pearls. The sunlight as barreling train. If she turns on the television I will watch the television. If she wants to make love, I will make love. And if she wants neither? So puts an index finger to my forehead, presses lightly, and walks right out the door. I lie on the floor and become the floor and it’s exactly how I knew it would be—already the shadow of her touch is cooling. The phone rings eleven times. The pigeon presses closer to the window glass. The hawk. Did anyone ask its opinion? I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I’m sorry.
The next gas station 107 miles and my heart ticking hot with the engine and the empty quart bottle gasping on the floor. Out There, Out West, where road kill evaporates before your eyes. Where the saguaro cacti lift their arms in prayer, and the citizens practice in the graffiti of the soul (example, on the overpass: THE DAY I WAS BORN GOD WAS SICK). How do you navigate the molten dash, the steering wheel melting in your hands? You don’t. You stop at a slanted shack. A smoky grill lined with meat and green peppers, rolled into tortillas, slathered in thick brown salsa. An accordion plays. Scuffling boots. The day yawns open like a desert bloom. Will you dare to eat a raw habanero? Chase it with Herradura, because we have no thirst for water here… And for a moment embrace forgetting; and that some things taste like a certain type of sin—hot and painful, but sweet. I’m sorry.
The road has a shoulder. The sun has fingerlings, and a sizzling eye. One witness to another, or how do you feel wonder over a caterpillar clinging to the windshield? So you will slow the car. Stop the car. Step into the Grand River, a can of beer tucked into each front pocket. Wade the Grand River. Read the Grand River, its hard copper lines. Its exhalations, gurgles and sighs. Sit in a swirling eddy that snatches your breath, and consider the philosophy of well-chilled beer. The same as the starlings painted sky, or even that woman in the pink windbreaker jogging over the dam. So feel the tongue of the water, drawing forth, flowing by; tasting. Feel the Steelhead writhing upstream, to spawn and then sleep. Drifting to the riverbed. One body to another, done and undone. I’m sorry.
There is a cow in the rain. It has a short life, and not so many options. I know less about cows, or any other animal, than I suppose. I once kept a snake in a glass bowl. Once roped a dog to a tree in my backyard, and called that dog happy, free. Over and over, it flung itself into the creek. There is a river in Montana where the gods hide. A bowing field of corn. A small airport right alongside. I have a Styrofoam cooler, full of ice and beer. Depeche Mode on the stereo. They call this juxtaposition. I am drinking beer and having this fantasy where I sing to all my new friends from a nightclub in Alabama. Wandering, on fumes, I miss my exit. Outside Birmingham, in an autumn drizzle, a boy pushes over a wheelbarrow. Struggles it upright, grunts and curses; topples it over again. He has my button nose. I’m sorry.
A man will sit in a Nebraska motel room watching Wimbledon on a greasy TV and be quite content. In his gut, onions and bourbon. What else? He thinks about cutting off all of his hair. He wonders who picked the paintings for this room: a purple (why purple?) seascape, a red canoe strapped to an old Chevy pickup, a field of corn aflame. A woman and a child hold hands and stroll across the television. A low chill enters the man’s body, a common cold. Outside the room, snow is hissing. The wind scuttling along. A lost history of meandering opossum tracks. He hasn’t held a telephone in seven days. He feels like floating. Like unclaimed sky. He keeps waiting to know something. Something less than the shrieks and groans of the ceiling, someone else’s floor. I’m sorry.
The Bottle
Glass is fluid as otters. I’m inside, a green-slimed otter, a new variety, floating on my back; fuzzy navel gazing. Alcohol, so salty oyster/sweet pearl at midnight, but loses a bit of sheen after sunrise Tangy Taffy, after Advil, or a kid’s show called Animal Planet. Did you know Ireland has sea otters? Now you do. I can still clutch a one-drink buzz—light, lilting, things moving inside that never move—only now it takes happy hours, and a big-ass Budweiser on the way home. Like the otter or chimpanzee, clever tool-user. A bottle opener in my ashtray. On my key-ring. Welded to the ossicle of my inner ear. My stepsister sits me down on a New Orleans street curb and says, Not every day in this life has to clank. Wait, that wasn’t my stepsister. It was music—you know how songs go exponential when drinking. Suddenly everyone is halfway kin, swarming together, heartfelt crackle and pop; and I get this idea to gather the flung coins of my family and vacation in Japan, tomorrow... You ever drank and Ebayed? Arriving soon, another mystery on the doorstep... Another vitamin X, nesting doll, or paralyzing subpoena. This truth: a songstress once whispered nine ways to put down the bottle: hurl into Ohio corn, clutch her hand (do it, fool, before all this fades), covertly slip into garbage bins, hover on the kitchen floor like a jellyfish, rise and flee—I forget the others. Something about otters, or green moonlight hung with crows. Wait. Here’s one: drop.
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My process is to write a long series of an idea. If I write 23 of something, maybe three will be worth a damn, or something. I don’t know. The creek outside is eroding my yard. I think it must be a metaphor concerning my mortgage. I feel tiny.
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