JASON HRENO

blows across the boy’s face suddenly,
and for a sticky, pixelated moment,
it becomes his head
—replacing it perfectly.
A quirk of time and space.
A glitch in the matrix.

Punched wings of color,
light and shadow,
vibrant but still,
somehow alive at rest;
a giant butterfly catching its breath
atop his little torso and four, stop-motion limbs.

For the briefest fragment,
it seems the child might explode into flight himself;
climb,
soar,
cartwheel and plunge,
flap, rattle and twirl
in shrieking spirals again, again,
rejoicing, exhilarated.
Seeing, feeling, being,
moving through the world as every child should.

But winds shift,
decapitating kites (and butterflies) from children—spasming helplessly,
they shrink into less and less agitated smudges,
then vanish,
their secret joys liberated from all time and judgement.
Swallowed by skies and lost forever.

from the collection “The Taste of Broken Glass” by Jason Hreno

A shelf-like limb protrudes from an unexpected place.
Your forearm—wedged between couch frame and cushion.
An elbow buried at one end. Hand at the other.
Like an inner tube escaping a pinching rim and tire, the flesh bulbous and supple.
Textured and plush.
A pillow in its own right.

But your skin,
The grain of each cell, follicle and pore—
Bio-hieroglyphs that form an unknown language, words, run on sentences, chapters and tomes, an ancestral alphabet stretching hundreds of thousands of years back in time,
aligned exquisitely into a quiet, breathing arc of symmetry and grace.
The story of your life,
Scribbled in some ancient codex.
A brail.

Its meaning embedded, inscribed in micro relief,
unlocked only by the pulsing cadence and verse of blood flow, resting heart rate and touch, while your lungs fill and drain,
barely audible, imperceptible,
but for an ear rising and falling,
like a moored raft,
swaddled in a tidal pool of thick, dry hair
that catches the light from the reading lamp,
connecting us all.

My breath rustles your tiny arm-hairs. A near invisible army stiffening to attention.
Cool at first then warmer as I near.
Lips so close they tickle.
Rolling over to swat me away like a fly.
A passing bus on the street shakes the house but always gently.
Dinner’s almost ready anyway.

Unexpected pictures of the prettiest little seaside seafood cottage,
somewhere on the west coast of England,
that pop up and dribble down my Instagram feed,
make me cry.

As if all the half-remembered dreams we ever had,
had gone ahead, arrived and re-assembled themselves
there to live without me.
Without us.
To find love without me.
Without us.
Worse, to find happiness without me.
Without us.

I wouldn’t have thought of painting parts of the cottage those colors or chosen those mismatched chairs.
But you might have.
And I would’ve been ok with it.
Taken the assertion of preference as affirmation of your belief and investment in me and our future.
The future that never happened and chairs we never bought on Kijiji.

The pictures almost taste salty,
That kelp infused shore breeze,
dissolving-ly astringent and sticky,
fragrantly bitter and mouth-wateringly unknowable
beyond their crisp borders.
Forever imprisoned in the 1:1 aspect ratio of some vaguely magical,
perfectly curated, other time and place.
A memory that never was. A silly fantasy that mocks its own false re-telling.
A ghost-like shadow doomed to wander the earth in search of any wan light that might cast pity and define it, for that vain nano-second of doom scrolling.

invisible knots or rungs that somehow pull knee to elbow, higher, curled fists trading places, clinging to perverse hope
That there will not be a next one.
Or that it—this tight rope of nothing—will fail
Finally releasing from the circular instinct and improvisation, the repeated sentence, to scale anything ever again.

The falling would glory the moment when the tower was no more than the imaginary citadel I believed to be the final keep of all dreams.
Hiding in your eyes, flickers erupting across your face, hints and promises, dancing in irises like movie scenes spliced for someone’s benefit.
Windows into a mythical city now vanishing into thin air like a mirage or ladder into clouds.

The silence always beckons. Following its seductive rhythm it, like an impossible drug to give up, not pursue as though another shot, another try lay at the end, its other side,
only a few strained breathes away.

Up down side ways. It’s never clear until inertia succumbs to gravity and internal organs rearrange to places they’re not meant to.
The sky pooling with bloody light. Hand writing inverted letters.
A movie playing backwards,
a record losing speed deflating tone to static.

Pretend to lie—
about all the sunsets we shared in silence,
their golden arms, like quiet laughter and fire that reached up
and right down into the throat of my being
hulling out the fruit,
a nut still beating in its shell,
or maybe just restless larvae clamoring to hatch.

Vain islands floating in broken atolls of clear green tears,
Waves sobbing against brisk, toothy reefs
Coral like embers of some distant dream or volcano,
Hissing as they try to fight back.
Reduced to irises now that have been forced to learn how to mock,
Burning themselves into our nights,
winking sequins like cosmic dice thrown
lazily reflecting as they skitter randomly here and there
over and over in hypnotic flares,
insects from across our galaxy
sent to remind us and oversee our tired intransigence,

A romance half sung, half stumbled in a vulgar polka of collapsed wit,
now a semi crumpled, half deflated and oddly stiff old game ball at a yard sale,
that once held such great but unkept promise, a lost spell, finally gloried but only in its own false irony and riddle.
Was it the ball or player? Who left the agreement first? Who disappointed whom?

Spasms from a submerged sleep, shuffle dance, the jerky, missed half-steps and throaty gurgles, the zombie like REM,
always chasing something into the sinking shadows
that always fall somewhere just ahead of us,
Ahead of themselves, always like black, light-absorbing leaves or silver-black rain but always silent like memories we’ve long just forgotten.
It’s time to balance the wind but I haven’t found the rhythm yet.
So, there’s no point begging clouds for mercy. Impassive, they will just change. They always do.