Matthew Grabelsky
Underground
I live inside the same narrow veins as the earthworms, sliding through the substratum 50 meters below the city’s surface. My mind is the scratch in a record that denies the sound of authenticity. I am thinking of the cracks in the walls of the tunnels, and I am smelling the bees. If I could break myself into pieces, I could stop the flood. But I am still here and still whole. I can swallow the bees, two at a time, until my insides hum. I can buzz and linger over flowers fat with pollen, and I can steal it from them without a fight. They would shriek and shrink as I lift myself into the air. I have no ears. I cannot hear the moaning and the droning of the dirty corners of this train. But I can feel the vibrations of the teeth grinding and their eyes flapping. And I do not want to be them. I am crossed. I am forgiven. I am ultimately alone. I work everyday. I am a worker. I am a drone with no one to serve. I serve only the worms who make avenues and tunnels, inviting me to hit the snooze button for years.
Island
Amphibian
From the sky, the island resembles a danish. A strudel. A green pastry that has fallen onto a black tablecloth. And even from as high as the Sun, you can smell the flowers singing. Each one leans into its song and thoughtlessly harmonizes with all the others. They are a choir, and they tell the story of their home. They perch on the branches of the black bark trees like mating birds in love. They are a mob of color and excitement. I have ripped them from the land and wrapped them around me like the shawl of an old woman. I take the island from the sea, and I bring it down here into the fractured tunnel of this carnival. I ponder it all. I look into the black tunnel with my black eyes, and I try to see the heat. I imagine the golden heat running faster than the train through the vena cava of this city island. I can see it dash into the open space of blue sky or the yellow tiled freak show. I am walking this binary line between where I was born and where I was born to be. The tops of my sentences say one thing, and the bottoms say something else. I am split like my tongue, and I am saying absolutely nothing. But there are no ears to hear me. These passengers are like bees. They feel the vibration of my voice, but they have no idea what I'm saying. And why would they? Why would they care about my speech or the flowers on my shirt? I am the island of my ancestors, rising out of the ocean from the depths of the earth. I am the volcano and the train, racing each other from one side of my head to the other. Both are red hot. Both scream as they run. Both remind me that I am always only a few steps away from being sacrificed for the good of the whole.
Brown
Bear
Maybe there's a bus where the driver is distracted because the people on the bus are pushing and shoving and forgetting that they are all one thing. Maybe they need to feel their hands go through the skin and the bones and the anger of their fellow passengers. Maybe one or two will hurl themselves into the softer side of the bus driver, and he will forget that his hands are on a wheel that is steering the bus. Maybe he will think the wheel is a hatch. He will think that the wheel is a prism and that the colors are his to control. He will point the bus into the tiny square that inhabit. The bus will find me here with my hands full of the gifts that I have for the baby birds of my world. It will throw its colors across my skull. It will hide me from the pounds of pressure that the ocean can apply. I stand here longer than I should, watching for a bus to come. All they do is make the turns and follow the lights and open and close their skinny doors. The comments and curses climb in and out. The busses are toothless and old, and the drivers thoughtlessly point their faces through the city. Maybe I will think that I am a revolving door large enough to swallow up the rumbling bus. It doesn't matter. My coworkers are hungry, and I am the farm. I am the treasures buried deep underground. I am a peanut with a shell soft enough to crush with your beak or your back teeth.
Hello
Mommy
I lift her by her name, and a thousand complaints drop from her handbag and her hair and her trousers. I am familiar. I am the light left on above the kitchen sink. I am the oscillating fan. I am sleep that never comes until it comes and then it stays like the hound that sheds and curls itself into a dumpling at the foot of her bed. I am the cry of a speechless animal, striking death into linoleum, sending sonar arrows out into the universe of a Walmart. I am the poked holes in your chin where chicken tenders find their way out of your mouth into the light of a Denny's. I am the tiny run towards joy and the tiny run away from pain. I am the sidewalk turned sideways until it meets the side of your face. I am the skin that you leave behind until I hold you and hold you and hold you and hold you. Until the holding becomes the warm towel that keeps the dinner rolls warm. And you feel every attempt I make to pat my love into your back. Your face is a glazed donut of fears, but it is the face that looks like mine. When you see my face looking at you like you matter, that's the only time you matter and there is a break in the war of your childhood. You breathe it in. You breathe in this childhood of pain and tears and want and need and in one breath I am inside of you. I pack your lungs with my love because there will be no other way for you to survive this journey. There will be no other way for you to get through all of the wretched air that they make you breathe. I must put every bit of my recipe into every single corner of your body so that when you are lost in wandering thoughts that float up and down the aisle of a subway, there will be something to anchor it all. There will be my voice and my breath and the sound of the oscillating fan and the flicker of the light above the kitchen sink that I leave on all night (and all day) as reminders to you that you are remembered.
Love
Frog
What is the deepest root? What dips its toes deepest into the soil of the earth? I‘ve lived long enough to know the things that live and grow, and I know it's not me. I don't have much weight when I put my foot down. I barely make a print. My body doesn't make much of an impression in the dirt or the dust or the mud. I am barely here. And when I'm gone, the weight of the earth won't change one bit. The streets I and the tunnels I travel won't even notice a disturbance once I'm gone. Now I am hoping for the only thing that could possibly make me present. I am looking for love. Maybe she will be my Earth. Maybe she will let me grow inside of her. I might fill her with my roots that tangle and twist and barely feed me. And I will leave it to her to untangle them. It will be a terrible thing to do but maybe she will do it. Maybe she will spend the years that it will take to make me into someone who will weigh something when all the things that weigh something are weighed together. She might make it so that when I am taken from the scale, there will be a change in the numbers. A small change, but a change nonetheless. Because with her I might matter. She will do all of this for me if I give her these flowers. Seems unfair, I know. But I have no choice. My toes are twisted this way and that. I have no way of being planted on my own. She can be my gardener. She can see to it that I am fed and that I grow and that I become her shelter when the rain comes. She won't get wet. She will give me life, and I will keep her dry. That's an unfair partnership, but it is the only thing I have to offer her. Well, that and these blood red roses that smell like love and are losing their petals with ever jolting bump of the subway.
Lady
Crow
Don't bother. Don't waste your time. Don't step into this steel and chrome tube of mine. Don't think about me at all. Wipe the thoughts of me from your mind. You can replace those thoughts with thoughts of anything, but do not let thoughts of me consume you. I am thoughtless. I am a magic trick. I am every last piece of silverware stuck in its place. I am the endless sound of the wheels turning. I am the squeal in the sound of the wheels being forced to stop. I make so much noise that I might as well be silence. And if you bother to look at me, you will look into the black cape of blindness. Because I will twist that cape from left to right or right to left, and I will flap that cape as I do my magic. I can yank the tablecloth from the table and leave everything as still as I found it. Because I am magic. I am the magician. I am the blindness that terrifies your eyes. I can terrify you from ever dreaming of me. I can make you wish there was no sky. And when I am finished living my destiny, I will sit on top the shoulders of the dead man who hangs from the wooden cross. I will scare the wicked from the fields. I will scare the wicked from your home and the tiny universe of tall stalks of golden corn. From any corner of the city, I will scare the wicked until they wish they were dead.
Ursus
Americanus
Generation after generation lived like the stones in the street. They lived like the rain that glistens from the black black blacktop. I don't know much about those generations. I hear stories. I see movies. I read books. But starting with my generation, I own these streets. I beat these streets. I brutalize them. They are mine, and they will obey me. As I ride over them, each one of them looks up at me and trembles. They know me. They can tell by the way I command them. They could feel me guiding myself over them. From one to the next to the next, they cower. I have places to go, but I've also made it my mission to ride on every street. To own the city. Because sometimes I'm on the sidewalk, too. My ancestors may have been under these streets. Their bones are melted into the streets. I hear them talking to me from the streets. But their voices are drowned out by the cries for mercy that come from the actual streets themselves. I am a tyrant. A sadist. I have no conscience as I torture the streets. I am fast, and my wheels dig into the asphalt like the giant wheels that turned the stones and placed them into rows that made up the pyramids of Egypt. I am a pharaoh. I am a redneck. I am a confederate, and I have seceded from the union of etiquette and rules. I couldn't care less. I see my colleagues doing the very same thing that I'm doing. And they must hear their ancestors as well. Our ancestors are singing to us. They're singing the old songs of hunger. They're singing the old songs of bullshit. But I am singing my own song now. My song sounds like the crack of a whip. A whip that is 5,000 years old. Moses is gone. Dead and gone. I am the new Moses, and I split the streets like a sea.
Bunnies
We come to the place where we've been together since before we were even born. The place where our arms wrap around each other. Before we could breathe alone, we leaned into each other and felt our bodies grow together. We could have been born attached. There would have been no real difference for us. We could have had to dress together and walk together and eat together and sleep together. Neither one of us would have complained although the world would have pitted us. And now they call us sweet. We are sweet but we are also foul. We are corruptible but not by each other. At first it seems good to have an ally. It feels good to have a permanent member of the team. But quickly you find out that the world will line up against you because it thinks you have an unfair advantage. And I guess we do. We speak in one voice. Not many can. They go out and search to find the perfect mate. They perfect their interactions until they finally make a promise to each other and to their families and to the world. Some of them even make their promise to heaven. They live and they live like this until one day they cannot live together anymore. They feel the surgeon's knife slice through the middle of them and separate them into two. They no longer share the air. They no longer share the floors and the walls and the ceiling and the TV remote. They no longer share the car rides to the beach and the lake and to the funerals of family members who were connected to one of them. They are no longer promised to each other, though. They are cut free. And they stand there and stare at us sitting here in this perfect spot. They see us embraced. No surgeon. No promises to God. We are sisters. We are together, and we ride in the same car even when we don't. Because my heart and her heart were made at the same time. They beat to the same syncopated clock. Where I am flawed and broken, so is she. We are not mirror images. We are the same image seen by people whose eyes are crossed. They think they are seeing double. But they are not. They are seeing twin sisters who can never be torn in two. Never to be separated since we were only a tiny single cell.
Author: Derek Letsch
Artist: Matthew Grabelsky
Matthew Grabelsky