I dream sometimes of sending the Moon back in pieces
I remember sifting our thoughts
through our teeth at night
filling thirsty, eager ears
with the essence of each other
until Midnight found my tongue
tripping on the jazz of your flesh.
you had a rabbit heart then,
before the Heroin, before
our love became six-feet deep.
I have spent every waking moment
racing as far from your memory
as possible
but years are far –
further than I go,
and I think this marathon is over.
there are astronauts still waiting to meet somebody
way out there
speaking in Sputnik radio transmission lingo
bouncing their electronic morse code out to Neptune
beckoning the Mothership to get here
and get here QUICK!
somewhere, Jackie Kennedy can’t forgive herself
so she dreams of chopping her tongue off
giving it to the Salvation Army
so nobody will ever know
that the City of Dallas warned her
“DO. NOT. COME. HERE.”
they say when we sleep
we are students of the dream.
we are teachers of the dream.
I dream sometimes
of sending the Moon back in pieces
to reverse the tides
just for THAT year.
to meet John Coltrane
when I meet your lips with mine.
but time has become a Rorschach test
sometimes I see you flexing your heart
swallowing everything around you like
a black hole, taking my ability to love with you.
sometimes I don’t see you.
sometimes Gravity is getting stronger
too strong.
soon my sanity is going to crash down
like a five thousand pound bomb
with the urgency of napalm.
soon I am going to unbind the gravity
you have on me from six feet down
so I can breath in Space
just once.
and who knows – maybe I will get caught
for forty years and an eternity
in the vast wilderness of Tesla’s dream.
perhaps, it is too late for me
because a long time ago
I was buried with you too.
spontaneously combusting at the wonder of it all
my childhood was hijacked by planes and desert conflicts
the way my father’s childhood was a cold war in Asian jungles.
the only thing me and my father shared was fear;
and the sirens that told us to get under a desk
hands over our heads
because everyone wants to believe
that surviving disaster is as easy as ducking for cover.
twenty-six years old now and I am a cell in a pathogen
that has been in mutation against itself for generations,
consuming its host and shitting out McDonald’s wrappers
and Starbucks.
sometimes when I think too much
about how I do too little for this world
I inhale deeply. several times.
sometimes I have to do that to keep from
spontaneously combusting at the wonder of it all.
we are 90% water and we are 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit,
get a good fever and that is close enough to boiling
you know, turning into steam.
we are all pretty close to being taken into the clouds
and being dumped over Montana in the mountains.
the same way nineteen terrorists,
two thousand nine-hundred and ninety-seven ghosts
four planes and the weight of two wars
were dumped over Texas
to rain on me and drown me
of what little innocence
original sin had allowed.
Joschua Beres (b. 1987) is a Texas native of Louisiana French-Creole, Irish, French-Canadian and German ancestry. He has previously been published in Bohemia, Every Day Fiction, The Kitchen Poet / UndergroundBooks, the anthology Milk and Honey Siren and Voicemail Poems. Future work is slated to appear in The Eunoia Review. Joschua is a US Air Force veteran and currently serves in the Texas Army National Guard. He currently resides just south of Austin in San Marcos, Texas.
–Art by Dia Takácsová