The Bluestone Review Spring 2022

Violence is a Season by Kate Madia

Choose Chicago, or New York, or Kentucky, no matter, the weather i nside of our houses, our hospitals, our hostels is broken against the fan blades, which is to say that the electricity is out and it’s smug in here and the stagnation is smoking us out onto our stinking ginkgo, shining old frying grease streets, these streets, our streets, have turned us out to flag our shirts on the clothesline I leap over the busted fire hydrant, shake to clips of Salsa from the bike messengers’ radio over the bus exhaust, all summer swamp wretched, jacked up flat tire kinetic from home to hospital, lurch through the freon gust of doors sliding, the snug of a cheek full of hot cigarette, and shiv, of course I am here, unarmed, waiting, in the trauma bay welcome the one who never intended to swim, pulled out from river’s vice, body bound eagle claw around twinned feather lungs, my hands fish out a plastic bus pass still in their pocket, a whirl of peppermint too, meant to get them someplace You know the one, whose name I won’t remember, with fine summer plans and with a face carved now beyond my eyes, closed, in the mirror at 4:00AM, break is all mouth with a bitter beat, laced, with mustard, the only spread that doesn’t look like blood, holed up under the open-all-night, eel-electric letters, the diner’s sign snarls over my hunched form, on the bench near the corner of a stranger’s Pardon miss, where can I buy milk for the morning? I don’t know. Crush of 6:00AM swamp atmosphere and ozone, deals out neat the weight of night, onto my shoulder’s pointy shields, offer aorta, nothing I push back inside through the ambulance bay and gawk stalk the scene, while sky sustains a back-handed broken bottle to the cheek, meanwhile the bantamweight charge of morning bleeds over a tall torso, still in its collar, leaning like love into alley’s refuge, cluttered with old ivy on even older wall, so I duck back inside then, welcome them too, usher a team approach to chaos, tubes and medicines, and a flurry of hands all on his body, which is designed to stand up, against this sort of restless season, as is mine, as is yours

54