America is a Top Golf and there’s roadwork everywhere. White Monster and NTS— lightning kills your mailman and I say
what do we do & are you getting this? You say there’s nothing to be done. Smiling, colder than anticipated, I repeat your words. Western malaise fills the rear view. Scientific progress goes Boink.
The car slips out of time. We lose our pronouns, briefly, and the spirit is near. Alive in the infinite interim, progress slows down to a snail’s speed.
Later—not now, but certainly not then— we drink PBR and sit and it’s all really sitting, if you think about it. And there is no end, if you think about it.
Utah tried to kill me.
In a variety of grocery stores situated in no-name towns from coast to coast, you can find Malt-O-Meal® Fruity Dyno-Bites® stored in 32oz Bags. At the time, five dollars seemed like a steal, but the market had priced in the catastrophe.
Only in hindsight do events gain linearity. By locating the event in language, I can claim it had to be this way. I cannot, however, grant you my vector. And I will not let you locate it yourself.
You’ll just have to take my word for it.
All I can say is that two small beasts lit up Fruita and when asked what their intentions were, they replied we were just doing what we were told.
Our weapons of choice were rhetoric and discourse. Unfortunately, they had rabies.
A heat-seeking missile has a goal and Torrey, Utah has a population of 283.
Millions of years of “history” have informed The sediment of our now. Apparently, the Noor hotel does serve breakfast. But that doesn’t matter to me.
I imagine you lying in Ozone Park.
The name starts the process again. But the problem is the process has been enacted so many times that the feeling is assumed.
So I look at the sign again, Hoping to break free from stifling assumptions, that the sensory experience can take me back to that night, all affect, no emotion. But it doesn’t. And I let my lips fall into a downward parabola, because a frown feels like the correct response.
I sit listening to Coltrane at the intersection of two life-changing experiences. The present pulls the past into its purview and I wonder if four years of lack can be filled by the gain of this trip; or if the lack has contaminated that sector.
By definition, a trip must end. And this was a trip. So, it did end. Just like that. We were back where we began. A little dirtier and Perhaps even worldly.
We had returned to the origin. And we looked at each other. He went back to work, She saw the dog, I returned home, And you lived in the pictures.
It happened and I liked it and it’s over. And there’s nothing one can really do about that.
Owen Avery lives in Brooklyn. He enjoys words and images. He has been published in Hobart Pulp, Stimulant Mag, Scaffold Lit, and other online worlds. He can be found on Instagram dot com under the name tubofguts.
High Horse 