"Grayscale Deer Mask" by Ingrid Santana (Pexels)
by Alejo Rovira Goldner
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After I drowned my seventh husband in his semen vat,
proverbs laughed me into the waterfall that lived in the fish that woke the evening up. Flowers made of Venusberg graced the fish’s belly, as well as floating Becky La Florida and Whisky Lynn. It was like being kidnapped by a French country dance tempered with patches of Byzantine chant. For comfort, an orphan sat beside my name and offered me a glass of glass, lovely and illegal. Like me, she was a fourteen-year-old man on a path. She was a forty-year-old boy on the wrong path, like me. Life rolled and pitched in the fish that woke the evening up except for one or two attacks of 1789 and conscience. Books remained unread, deleted fast as smiles. We painted a ballroom the colors of youth because both of us lived for one thing: youth. We lived like a high schooler’s last wishes frenched and groped like Chippendale trash, culprits in a steam of unwisdom all our own. You ask me to explain myself: I won’t, I can’t. But see my seventh husband’s corpse, rising bit by bit locked in chunks of ambulance and hearse. I’ve awakened to a song of frizzle: this earth, after all, has no moth wings left to lift it. |
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Alejo Rovira Goldner (he/him) left Spain in the 1990s to settle in Southern California. He also publishes under the name Alex M. Frankel. His chapbook is So Many Mouths at the End of All Beauty.
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