Matthew Dickman - Grass Moon
My whole body is warm and sticky like a child’s car seat just waiting, just waiting, in the dark the blue heron that lives in Laurelhurst Park is breathing and there is a wind that is coming all over the flowers and all the ferns. I’m on my way to myself, that’s what I’m told, that’s what all the people who want me to be alive keep saying, they keep standing on the beach wearing old-fashioned swim trunks with a bullhorn telling me about it, and you are home in your bed like a soft animal with really intense feelers and a kind of knowledge some people have to go out into the desert to get, some people have to take drugs for that and walk barefoot over coals and pretend that nature is a mother always wringing her hands over her lost children. I’m making a museum for myself out of pictures of people I used to know and hold and their brains are like carnations floating in milk when I think of them I think what do I really want out of this branch I picked up off the street which does not belong to me at all. Last night I asked the ceiling what was going to happen, and it said this is what is going to happen: you will have to stay in your body for much longer than you really want to, and I thought about how nice it felt the first time I shaved my head and walked out into the rain and how the rain walked all over my head and how when I hear someone yelling something at someone else, when I hear someone throwing something across a room, I want the world to be my laundry— quiet and good and neatly folded away.
- Grass Moon by Matthew Dickman
