BANG OUT

You ask does the body know its own history. Sometimes it gets you mixed up with the people on the radio but you can’t seem to fall asleep without them. You bring home a stranger who tells you he works for the local station. Perhaps you’ve heard his show? It’s cold in the apartment but he asks you to open the window. He sits in the sill and watches you for hours. When you wake, all you have left is the static and the door propped open by what was once the breath of him. Your body, as if opening its shutters too quickly. It seems to go but only fades in and out at intervals, a ghost craft. You follow its trail of invisible ink. You turn up the volume on the radio. You hear his voice, and behind his voice the bomb from sixty five years ago. The day has come to remember it, again and again, the definite article. But why not the breathing? Could it be that every bomb since then is just an echo? Then: an unmarked outcropping. You collide with it. Then then then then then then then then. At some point you just stop counting. Could it be that every year is falling through the same unbroken window, where every breathing thing is just geometry? A ghost craft, whose wing is fixed in echo, whose weight is greater than the breathing of so many. The air it displaces. It comes looking for you.