Issue 46: Summer 2019

KYLE.

the boy with hands like catcher’s mitts faces two whole blunts/ before he has the courage to surrender to me. straddling

 

the boy with hands like catcher’s mitts faces two whole blunts

before he has the courage to surrender to me. straddling

a backward chair, he watches me flick ash into a flowerpot

while all the light in the room pools under my eyes.

he says, i want to tell you a story. says it so quietly i cannot see

what is dark & sprouting in the sinkhole behind his teeth.

i am too busy playing magician, making the tiny grey molecules clench

& wink, so when i say ok, it signals that i have opened my face

for the drinking, & in rushes a gift of black water

louder than any ode. he says,

i didn’t mean to kill her. my skin balloons to fill the room,

blanketing his twisted mouth in shadows large enough

to cover the holes in this story where the grief eats through.

the stars, in shame, annul themselves, & in this apocalyptic fog

i make myself a boy like him, weedy, sprinting past the trees

in search of silt or something holier. three of them

in all, not including the girl, trotting dutifully paces behind

(—i can’t remember her face, he says, so imagine instead

how it could be air there, rolling along her scalp,

above the pearls of her eyes—)

each of them a victor in his own right, but it is her who throws

a wrist & signals the clearing, that birth of their carriage

in 3pm light. & they are so beautiful, standing there, bleached

pink & full up with need. he says, it was my dad’s car.

waves his hand & the truck’s spartan blooming is magnified

in the eye like a peony. envision, if you will, four dirty teens

climbing into the mouth of the devil with bare feet. pay attention

to the swallowing. all that red in the teeth, & he doesn’t have

to say anything more. we know where the story goes,

because someone else is at the helm & they are looking back

to shout at us. not me, or him. not even god, who sits in the branches

because he is tired of getting grass stains on his shoes. kyle kneels

on the swath of carpet between us, moving from the couch to the floor

again like a woman possessed by the weight of her knowing.

what was her name? the joint i carry a spear between my fingers.

me, leaning out of the fog to read his eyes, the notches

of his spine in prayer; were it not for the sound trickling in

from the kitchen, i would forget that there were others here,

that it is not just us. the lights are so low—or is it the dark lengthening,

stretching its spindly arms to tower above my head and render my

seeing implausible? the imprint of a cushion on kyle’s cheek makes him younger

than my eyes need him to be. but rewind to the clearing, where the light

has been devoured by muck, and young bodies are ricocheting

through time with their skins blown off—or perhaps only

their senses. kyle’s hands begin to shake, & so do the details.

it is as much my tale as his, so maybe i am the boy

hungried, stretching my hand out towards a pretty girl,

but she is not looking at me: rather, one of the many hims

in the passenger’s seat with the orange on his collarbones,

in his philtrum rinsing him clean.

could it be kyle, with the hat backwards & the bright eating his face

away like acid? maybe. she looks so long & hard that she does not notice

the hot plastic rushing up to greet her mouth, her exposed cheek,

salted meat sabered away from the bone. maybe there was too much

dirt in the wheels. either way the truck is in air, is alive. look. see

how it devours clouds & women. see how the gloved fire catches

legs spread-eagled as if they mean too to kindle, & the logic of tears

cannot dissuade them. i say i am a boy but perhaps i am the air

that blankets her—only to avoid seeing the grief that paints

his face when he realizes that there is no way to staunch the red

erupting from her throat. blood spots the leather seats where her teeth

have planted themselves, & kyle envisions uprooting them

with giant hands, even his sight /spotting/, the red running black

through the gaps in his fingers where her flesh clumps, limp as a tern’s

blue meat. & what about the other—boys, i say, so i can get it right later,

where did you put the rest of the bodies? but the words only live

this life in my head. i pose them to sit kinder in the mouth

when i speak, but even still it eats at him. i watch kyle move

& be moved by his mouth, feel the commensurate dread as spit,

tired of this dancing, settles at the corners of his lips.

he says i. don’t know. i think. i know we left the truck

in the field. because the wheels. wouldn’t move we couldn’t

get them to go. i think. in the trees. blake hid the body in the trees

& we couldn’t get it down. her down. she was just air. we didn’t

have enough fingers to hold her.

he holds his hands out in front of his face like they are wide

enough to net the past through. drain the black water so i can see

everything through the holes, i want to say, but kyle is too high to speak

now, his freckled back to the door and his eyes tracking the moon’s

waning paleness—like someone who has lost

their lover in it, like someone still looking for their shape

in every incoherent, wet glimmer.


 

About the author

Lyrik Courtney is a June Fellow of the Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets (2019) and the Adroit Summer Mentorship (2017). They are an alum of The Adroit Journal’s Summer Mentorship Program and a recipient of the Janef Newman Preston Prize and the Betty W. Stoffel Award for Poetry at Agnes Scott College. They have been published in journals such as LiminalityNinth LetterBlueshift, and Strange Horizons and their work is forthcoming elsewhere. You can find them on Twitter @lyrk_crtny.