this is my body

eating and drinking at the end of the world by jonah james fontela

[eatdrinkdie]

She tried to cheat the light. A suicide left. It was early evening, warm in summer, when all forward motion stopped. We barreled straight into her. No time even to know, or for brakes. The car wobbled under us and the windshield spiderwebbed from the impact my head made with it. My sister, older by four years and off to college in the fall, was there. By only coincidence. Getting ice cream at the Dairy Queen with her boyfriend on Whitney Ave. She found me on the curb, the car hood twisted and smoking in front of me. I laughed. I remember laughing. Why is my sister here? I was 15 and I was alive so I laughed. Everyone had a seatbelt on but me. Joe driving, Mary and Dee in the back. The EMTs arrived and rushed around looking for whoever was in the passenger seat. For me. I raised my hand. I was the kind of fine everyone hoped for. Alert. No blood. A few cubed jewels of safety glass stuck in my cap. I wasn’t dead. I was strapped to a board and taken away. It was dark by then and I remember the lights of the ambulance as we continued down Whitney to the hospital where I was born. My father, who hadn’t had a cigarette in years, began smoking again that night. I was afraid of the car after that. I didn’t say so. Kids are taught to expect all things to revert to good and OK forever. It’s jive, but they don’t know that. A small seed began to grow in me, the knowledge that you can’t know the boundaries of anything. Sounds you never knew. Moving ahead and then suddenly rattling backward. Later that night, back home and quiet, something appeared. An earring, lost a decade back and hunted for since, was found. It belonged to my mother’s mother. My Nonna. And there it sat at the top of a drawer swaddled in linen like a wedding ring on a pillow. My mother came to believe, out of desperation and grief, and her own need to know where the boundaries were, that my Nonna, dead by liver cancer since the summer of 1984, had held my head back against the crash.

[Photograph: Car Crash by Weegee, 1941]

[eatdrinkdie]

They threw everything inside out. A rain of wood and old nails from high up windows. Clouds of crushed stone. All twinkling like comet tails in the low sun. Amazing the speed of demolition. Then they sawed the house in half. Cut top to bottom right through the middle. It stayed that way, open to the elements, for ten months. An untethered tarp left to flap and snap through winter and its winds. This is how you make millions. Carve holes. Lift higher, dig out what’s beneath. Unearth bottles of ancient milk and half pints of secret cream sherry. Haul the whole thing up with a crane and set it down on an extra floor. That’s a million right there. Easy. And what of the tree? That evergreen. The one the neighbors planted to remember a death. It’s all alone in a clearing of wet dirt. The planter, dead now too, watched it grow. Lit it to holiday twinkle. Marking the years in fresh inches. The early rattle of temporary fencing calls like nature-sound now. A better good morning than none at all. Each new day the day, maybe, the paperwork clears for a felling. [Art: Splitting by Gordon Matta-Clark, 1974]

[eatdrinkdie]

The leaves and grass fused. Crackle underfoot. Thin sheets of breaking beaker glass. There will be no more mosquitos. As of the break of this day, when unraked leaves drew maps of rising wind. So say the frosts. None in opposition. All in favor. The motion passes. The drunk last hero of that buzzing tribe dies right out. Swept away with the browning dust. These men, here in green-yellow safety vests and thicker layers beneath, will blow away soon too. We needn’t mourn this. They’ll return again when it’s their time. To dig by morning and fill of an evening. To fiddle, cut from our sight at the knees, in the noisy holes they make. For now, and these next solemn months, let us worry other plagues. [Painting: Make it Better by Leszek Skurski, 2016]

[eatdrinkdie]

They take the street. An occupation. They chain their gear, earthmovers and bobcats, generators and box trucks, along the road. Leave them through the nights. The men mass each morning. Early. Feet scrape the pavement. Fingers flip switches to start the motors running. A heavy wheeze. The cough of a backhoe, that yellow metal dinosaur, buzzes guts in low notes. It begins. The interval bleep of machines in reverse; a pilot twisting his back in the cockpit to keep from disaster. Now the jackhammers. The wrecking vibration. Their casino floor jackpot rattle. No warning for these. They start like gunmen. Like panic. The trunk of the dinosaur pokes and pulls up hunks of road. Peels away blacktop like fruit skin. The orange cones close us off to traffic for all the work hours. No city bus ups and city bus downs. No too-high stereo sounds. No too-fast drivers rushing to red lights. Just the work of these hard-hatted men. Black men. White men. Men who hate it here. Over and over. The same. Every day. They open the road, insert the stents that stretch in old-time licorice logs and slumber across five spaces on Newton Street. They scurry behind the masks they hate and down into these holes they make. Graveyard trenches. They send the rats, hungry and homeless now, running to where I stay. Licking at scraps around the rusted metal grills in the alley. Rats more afraid of starving than of me stamping my foot. Clapping my hands. The men, the black men and the white, fill their holes at autumn dusk, folding two slices of pizza into one and chewing with full cheeks. They drink sugar drinks for late-day pep while the leaves scurry, like young sisters, along the road beside them. All race toward winter. Only so many days now. The great and ancient Quieter approaches as these men seal their day’s trenches with hot marshmallow tar. They tamp their dressings down tight for the night. [Painting: The Trench Diggers by Fernand Léger, 1916]

[eatdrinkdie]

There. A body in the road. Small and furred and crossing the yellow lines like an unequal sign. The brushy tail lifted by the breeze of our early fall. The death scene lit by the sharpest dagger sun - when new winds force the leaves down to scrape the pavement in old claws. I hope this wasn’t the squirrel I saw through my window, stained from sudden rain and storms that pulled the old oak down with its leaves. That pounded small tantrum hands into the soil. A flurry of punches. He buried an acorn. Or tried finding one. Or scrambled mad to remember where he left one when his belly was fat and even the hawks rested happy in their perches, OK to let a meal get away. There’s no rush in fat times. But these are the desperation hours. Winter's gate. Those same hawks, spotted with gunmetal gray, swoop like aimed arrows. Bullets with purpose. Now the squirrels, rats and raccoons, all the tethered animals of the earth, race careless into the roads, forgetful of the killers left and right. Those predators who know not hunger or peace. It is the October harvest of small dead souls. Their fluids spilled. Only a gathering wind to ripple the fur like sea grass. [Print: An Oak Tree in Winter by William Henry Fox Talbot, 1842]

[eatdrinkdie]

Home Grown Pt. One A child walked through my front door. He looked around the living room, tilted his head the way some dogs do, and asked a question. Are you a grown-up? I did the usual tap-dance we do around kid-questions. His mother was right behind him lugging all manner of kid-stuff, ragged from the red eye. I’d offered my place to the three – two kids and one mother – to rest up between flights that would take them on vacation somewhere blue and warm and sandy and open-barred. Sure I’m a grown-up. I grew up with your dad, I told the boy. I’m even older than him. But his question stayed with me. I wondered what made him ask it. What’s on the walls, maybe? The curious drawings crawling with human figures in tight-white underpants and halloween skull masks. The driftwood suspended on nails like frozen gusts of summer wind. Prints of the insides of some rabbits and dogs and cows. Could be the cracks in the old linoleum floor in the kitchen. The size of the apartment might have made him wonder too. You can see my bed from the couch and the front door from the bed. He scrolled through his young brain looking for the cues of an adulthood he knew. A yard. A house. A driveway with cars in it. A garage full of junk. Yelling. The threat of spankings. None of these were here. I pointed out the beds to my guests. I told them about all the breakfast foods I’d stocked in the kitchen for their little stay of one piece of one day. I wished them all comfort. I hugged my old friend’s wife and made off for my own day away. At the library. Then the coffee shop. Four in my place is one too many for me. Drawing: Untitled w/ Lazlo and Eagle by Joseph McVetty III

[eatdrinkdie]

The rat boxes arrived today. A ring around the house next door. A house left to the reckless weeds. A small stone yard, once tended prim, ragged with overgrowth. The boxes, coffin-sized to a city rat, send aromas to the still air to beckon prey. Out from the growth, where fattened rabbits gnaw, lazy and lucky, in the suddenness of vast green meals. A bounty born of neglect. Come you rats, out now from the cracks in our foundations, the cellars dusty with asbestos. Come inside here where it’s warm and there’s food. In now. The trapdoor. The gas chamber. I see no yellowing snapshot when I look to the decay across the driveway. Forgotten are those good neighbors. The quiet games of shaded Scrabble. Iced teas and warm greetings. I’ll not drag their barrels to the street on Thursdays. No more. They belong now to the Developers, the bringers of rat boxes. The forces of desertion. Disorder. They who wait for that one fine day when the permits come through downtown. When the earthmovers stretch, groaning through their morning yawn. I root here for the rats and wait, same as Developers do, for demolitions to begin. The echo of dumpsters. Squalls of rubbish. [Painting: Eldena Ruins by Caspar David Friedrich, 1825]

[eatdrinkdie]

I considered the rabbit in passing. Pacing the driveway up and back, counting my steps and chalking a slash on the fencepost to mark a hundred. I decided the animal was dying. The way she sat perfect and still under a canopy of hasta leaf, hunkered flat in the mulch, spoke to fear and endings and the need for deep rest. This wild city rabbit, in still-hiding, wasn’t long for this world. I felt I knew that, and worried for where she might go to die and decompose and smell up my own little world. But I don’t know how rabbits act for most of the day. Do you? I only see them when they come out to nibble green mouthfuls of weeds and leaves in the evenings, sometimes early in morning. They roam among us only at the tinted dusks and the dewy dawns. I don’t know how they spend the rest of their day. Most of their day. Perhaps this is precisely what they do. Find a shaded spot. Sit death still. Wait. Thinking the rabbit dead, its coal black eyes wide open, I scraped the ground around the plant with my broom. But dead she was not. Off she darted. Heedless. Across the street. Plump and full of life. She’s since come back to lounge under her favored leaf. I won’t chase her. I check from the window above and wonder, aloud, if she’s back. Disappointed if she isn’t. Smile if she is, tucked away and huddled in a long fillet of gray fur. Who are we to know? All we can do is wonder. But I’ll not chase her off again. This I do know. If she dies here, she’ll die a friend. [Painting: Red Rabbit by Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1982]

[eatdrinkdie]

The fireworks once terrified me. Years and years back. Something to do with being so small – the looking up into an endless sky at night. I watched from inside on those july fours. I watched behind sliding glass with someone’s great-grandmother. She was frozen in place, shock painted forever on her face. So many years she’d waited, patient and dutiful, for a death in her black widow’s dress. Now, today and so far away, the fireworks pop and bang everywhere around me. No date. No prescribed time. As common as the morning birdsong and the windy rush of the city bus, engine climbing from one corner to the light at the other. When I go to bed, early, the fireworks crackle a message from some distance I try to gauge. The ballpark? The riverside? That empty lot near where the train-whistle huffs. I’ve warmed to these explosions. The pop and crackle carry a knowledge that someone somewhere close lit a fuse and ran, heart thumping, from the danger. Some sizzle like fat in a pan. Others fall like rain droplets off a shaken umbrella. The rounds between three and four are fiercer, more rapid, deeper in the bass of your guts. Mortar fire. They wake me and force me to hear, eyes open, still looking up all these years on. Here I see a ceiling painted rough in arcs like saw blades. No more glass panels mixing the canvas of human skeleton, refrigerator door and a fire burning hot in the sky. I enjoy these fireworks now. Their call from an unknown distance. I’m grateful too. That I’m here, in the quiet dark, to hear. [Art: Poppy Series: Hallucination No.1 - Gunpowder on Canvas - by Cai Guo-Qiang, 1957]

[eatdrinkdie]

The end of all things is there in the fire. In those caverns down below. The start-over’s there too. The melting of iron and steel to fluid. The razing of whole states once sturdy as living oak. The embers form to warm hands on a first new day. Find the fires, friends, through the smoke and the gas. Find where the first men and the first women gather to begin again, clean, washed over in flame. Send signals on the winds in gray trails like birdsong. Warming meat, fats turned liquid to hiss on coals, whispers a message. It’s in a voice so low you can barely hear. We’re here. Still, we are. Join us.

[eatdrinkdie]

There are gaps in the fire where flames swirl the hollows. It’s hottest there. Wood tightens in fists of coal. I imagine myself in those places, carved away to molten badland caverns. Where embers spray out to the night winds like carrier pigeons seeding the world with hope. I burn this fire in the neighbor’s abandoned driveway, between two homes darkened by disease and catastrophe. They’re dimmed by fear and flight. Fear of a world on fire. And out of it. My fire burns as a sign of life. We’re here. It hisses. Punctuated by pops of trapped air. Gasps. That man who walks by the alley, he’s here too. He knows. So he raises his fist through the fire between us. The heat bends what we see. What did he see? I wonder it. A meal? Danger? A threat? An invitation? The campfires of childhood. Loosed embers sparking like fireflies near the fenceline. Something eternal? A sign of gods and men. Remember lighting candles for our dead on the side alter at church? A folded dollar bill and a flame for Nonna. Remember why? A spark catches and holds as long as it’s fueled. We are the flame. It's the birth of us. The ash, thinner than moth wings and mornings, is the death. Zeus knew. Prometheus too. So did Jesus and his dad. They’ll have you fear the fire. They want the flames to haunt you. The way they can grow. How they climb and punish. The heat rising to unbearable. They leave surgery scars in rails to crisscross the plains and puncture the mountains. They send us into the sky, strapped and terrified. The warmth and the danger. The fear and the need. Those flames so bright they light the way to our doom. Look. It’s in neon. Each spark that drifts free and clear, a likely devastation. I can’t look away. Not ever. Until the ashen end. [Painting: The Fire That Consumes All Before It by Cy Twombly, 1978]

[eatdrinkdie]

Bless me father for I have sinned. It’s been a long time since my last confession. We never told the whole truth back then in the box. We waited our turn, each first Friday, sliding our asses on the slick of the pew, the church quiet. Full only of the stomach-churning incense. The thin echo of the hat racks we snapped. Gone was the thump and wheeze of the organ. It drifted up and out through a hole carved in the ceiling throwing slashes of light across the face of Christ, twisted and tormented and pleading for a quicker death. We did the arithmetic. We compiled a list of deeds, wrongs so vague as to not tickle the father’s nostrils. Nothing to make him twitch. Just enough to keep him on the other side of the box where we smelled the mothballs and his breakfast burps. We never dug down deep into ourselves for the juicy stuff. We were smart enough, little boys with our clip-on ties and gray slacks crisp as cardboard, to never say the worst of it. Best way to stay out of the spider web. Keep that balding shadow through the metal screen off your back. Say some heavy shit and the next step was the office behind the confessional. In armchairs. Facing each other. The lights on. Oh yes, father, I was mean to my sister. I sure was. I cursed, it’s true. I got mad at my mom too. That was enough to keep us all from further questioning. A few Hail Marys and Our Fathers – the Act of Contrition you had to say in front of him and careful not to forget the Thees and Thys and Heartilys. Just enough. It bought you four more weeks outside the box. [Photo: Ruins of St. Martens Cathedral in Ypres, Belgium, 1915]

[eatdrinkdie]

Gasps like an iron lung. Forcing breath, without consent, at gunpoint. In. Out. Up. Down. The push and pull pounds chilling November air. Does it mix cement? Claw at the ground with its non-stop thump? Tamp the dirt to suit its hunger for flat earth? Even with trees made bare by winds, there’s no view from here of the worksite. That house they’ve laid out in fresh linens where an old one huddled and grew mold, joists turned soft like sea foam and organ meat. They tore that house right out. Out of memory too. Men in Warning Yellow vests and hard hats crawled all over it for months. They piled what boards they could save. They put up wire fencing and left their earthmovers on the streets overnight. They filled dumpsters with the useless guts of the old home. They craned up the foundation and dug out a floor under it. Build down instead of up? Bravo. A lawyer's trick aimed to squeeze an extra million from a deep pocket in need of high-end underground shelter. This circus. This ruckus. All a half-block from where the dump truck, loaded heavy with gravel, ran down a tiny girl. It went over her once in first gear and then again in reverse. The giant wheels made a stain of her on the pavement, washed away by the next day’s rains. The breaths of this iron lung, invisible through the trees, pant in dumb zombie passion. The lung will breathe as long as it’s needed. As long as there’s fuel to burn in it. And cash for the gas. It will live longer than the little girl. Longer than her shanty memorial pinned to the streetlight, petals crisped, photos bubbled yellow and left to vanish in the natural world of regular death. [Drawing: Untitled Drawing (Harper’s Magazine) by Ben Shahn, 1948]

[eatdrinkdie]

     Bruno left the room and stood in the stairwell while his wife slept. She was pale and withered from exhaustion and days of illness. The waves rose to new heights that night and he was afraid of the dark ocean on all sides of them, the empty point in any voyage when it’s longer to go back than it is to carry on. A hopeless pit grew in his stomach. Why are we here? He asked himself. The metal stairs, cut from top to bottom through every deck of the ship, were spotted with old women. They were dressed all in black. They were on their knees, lining the steps like a chain of ants. Rosaries swung from their hands and clacked the railings. The strands of beads swayed with the waves. The women prayed from fear. They prayed from habit and shame. They begged protection for their families and for themselves. Bruno, who never prayed, watched their fingers move from one bead to the next like shelling beans in a bowl. There were so many prayers moving through the echoing stairwell that he hoped one might reach him and make his wife well. [Painting: From Santi & Licheni by Mattia Papp, 2018]

[eatdrinkdie]

The lettuce lay out flat on a towel. Soaked from the tap and rinsed of grit and soil, the leaves were left large like sails to anoint our chins with olive oil. Nonna folded the towel over once, then again. It was a rope, long and lean, now. Two ends looped like a serpent bit its tail to infinity. She stood, looking out, atop three cement stairs. She swung the towel, heavy with wet lettuce, like a club. She swung with violence through her right shoulder and elbow. A young David with his sling. She sprinkled the rows of garden climbing the chain-link fence. Dotted dark the pocked walls of the chicken coop and the trunks of pear trees shading the picnic table where old paint curled away. She swung like the priest, that greedy sonofabitch in white finery with his silver baton, wetting the heads of his flock. That holy water. Always cold and oiled and stinging from the bucket. Nonna swung until her arm tired and the spittle, the spray through towel, weakened to a trickle. A faint drip. To nothing at all. Then she turned back to her kitchen, her lettuce dry and her world blessed with fresh dew. [Photograph: Filipinos Cutting Lettuce by Dorothea Lange, 1935]

[eatdrinkdie]

     Marciano’s punches are windmills. Big and stupid and heavy. Lumber. But dangerous, like an old house that might fall on you and kill you with only girth and power and gravity. These are the punches born of rage. Born of fear, the copulation of shame and craving. To be somebody. To keep from being nobody. They hurt all the same. [Photo: Rocky Marciano (right) & Roland LaStarza at the Polo Grounds, 1953]

[eatdrinkdie]

Nothing grows in the salt marsh but the sea grass. Oh how it glows at dusk like spun gold. A thin layer, matted in parts like the unruly hair of young boys, covers where the popeye crabs burrow in their holes. The horseshoe crabs, old and young and little and large, are dried and tipped like old war helmets fallen on the field at the edges where the dead trees show their trunks among the living. It’s here where the charges begin or end. Where the line holds or breaks. It’s hell on the trees here. The dead ones – the choked salted oaks and lichened cedar – show bleached trunks in the tree line across the meadow of marshland. The dead wood, still rooted firm, snakes like varicose veins through the green and healthy neighbors. They show as skeletons, that bleached white of the old bone, hung in surrender among the still-living leaves. [Painting: Untitled Dead Tree Watercolor by John Nash, circa 1945]