Letter to My Coworker, Who Keeps Making Jokes About Killing Herself
Performative, being non-intuitive in meaning not performance
but creationary utterance, the expressive force of godliness, is therefore not
the word I want to use for what I’m saying—maybe instead existential
or molecular or something more robust like pomegranate-eating,
rope-bearing, lightning-striking-at-the-base-of-the-neck. The neck
is the hinge of the body, or so I have been told, which brings me
to my subject, these brief half-entertainments of severing your spinal cord
with bullets, and crumpling your organs in between the rusting metal
of your dashboard and the driver’s seat, and—no, actually, I refuse to offer
any more of these images. I’m certain you’ll provide them on your own.
That is—did you see the cranes today, stopping in the wide fields huddled
like schoolchildren? Have you seen schoolchildren looking—really
looking—at the sticky clustered faint beginnings of green insects
underneath these notched and waxy leaves? I mean language shapes
reality like children shape play-dough between their hands, rolling
it around and pinching squeezing tearing rearranging until something
startling emerges fully formed. When you say Maybe I’ll just
kill myself it means that something in the world has opened, snapping,
a hinge squeaks as you close the window to the long bright days
of summer, not performative in the sense of a marriage declaration
or a life sentence but in the sense that every wildfire needs oxygen
and fuel to stay alight. When the dry grass catches, you can see
the swarms of birds and insects rising toward the sky; even a mosquito
iridesces if you look at it just right, in the brightness
of the melting dripping burning summer sun. Don’t tell me this life
is not worth living. Say there’s something blooming in our palms.
by Zeke Shomler
Zeke Shomler is an MA/MFA candidate at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. His work has appeared in Sierra Nevada Review, Folio, Cordite, Anodyne, and elsewhere.
