‘on young boys & flying cars’
Photographer Grace Sleeman
on young boys & flying cars
In the corner of the playroom
there's a young boy
throwing cars and saying that they
can fly and that he wishes he could
fly, too
saying flying makes him
feel like he's glowing, succeeding,
and all that glory makes him
blind
to the car crashing on the colored carpet
deaf
to the crunch of other kids trampling
over its pink "monster-strong" shell
In the corner of intersection
there's a man made of blue
eye bags and blue
bruises and a blackened,
splintered heart,
throwing sleazy glances, pills and
cracked wedding rings and wishing for
obscene things and he knows
that people will walk by, spilling
over with broken pieces
waiting to be put together
again - just like him -
and he thinks that he can use their jagged,
crumbling ruins to patch up the
cracks spreading over his soul,
that they will make him feel like
he's glowing and shining,
feel like he's flying,
and once he's done he can
watch them clatter and shatter
once again, and it won't
affect him, and go find a new
broken target to play
with when that
glow fades away.
And somewhere in him
that little boy lies looking at the world
surrounding him and the little, sweet
naive voice inside of him thinks
that just like he did with those
pink plastic purposeless
monster-truck cars
he can grab at things and they'll
do his bidding and he'll feel
like he's glowing once again.
They spend so much time
trying to heal the wounds
of those who stepped on the glass shards
he scattered when he fell apart,
telling him that if he cleaned
up after himself then nobody
would have been hurt. They
obsess over him using
fragile flowers as gauze while he
bleeds out all over his monster
trucks. But every time he
cracks someone in his
calloused fist to use as a cream
to ease the pain nobody asks
what exactly
injured him in the first place. Every time
someone breaks under his feet
nobody asks why he needs
others to be his cushion, his soft
ground to walk on when his heels
are splintered and cut.
They're so busy treating the victims
that they have no time to notice
the little boy writhing in pain as the slumped,
hooded shell of a man around him
throws his monster
truck people and screams out that
he wants them to make him
fly.
Gale Fabrikant is an amateur poet based in the San Francisco Bay Area, California. Her writing centers on observations of the human condition. She hopes to be an ambassador for the underappreciated, the silenced, and the voiceless.
Grace Sleeman is a poet and photographer living and working in Portland, Maine. Her photographic practice is focused on intimacy between subject and photographer. Her work has appeared in Koukash Review, Bardics Anonymous, and Noise Magazine, among other publications. You can find her online at @myrmiidons.
