Red,
Two letters come late in the night. First one says it’s from the white house, totes a thousand dollar check and expresses the system’s sympathies. It’s demanding our help in restimulating its economy, we think, but the font is too rigid. A font like oppression, it hurts our eyes, so we nail it to the portrait hanging above our bed.
We haven’t slept, Red, not in days, so we accidentally use a rusting screw.
And the second letter breaks our heart. Our brother writes how the farm is in good spirits, how it’s in the real. How the wild blue indigos we planted sway like sea water in the moonlight, how on Easter he hunted mushrooms in the hillsides and discovered an enormous blue glade.
He laid in the evening dew, just kind of resting, when a familiar shape came to him in the rock formation. In the shape he saw a poem, something about how dew is made of crystals, how crystals store energy as they form. He wants to call us, he writes, he wants to read it, but now he can’t find the right kind of air.
Poetry is the organization of breathe, he reminds us, then says it’s time, man, please, come up.
We can’t, Red, you know. We write how we’ve been searching for something special in these rides, how when we can’t find the special thing we feel broken. We ask him to please understand, knowing he will.
There’s no finding sleep, so we ride to Grace Court for some midday dancing. It’s been empty here, mostly, aside from the pinkish rich kids playing sports in the cul-de-sac. The birds love them, the way their crystal tiaras tilt in odd angles while they run, the way they hang elegant birdhouses in the island facing branches.
We like how they make their demands in red chalk, little protests about how they must get back to school. How this is all such bull shit, how they miss their friends and cubbies and boxes of milk.
Today, though, these cops and centrists fill the walkway. Everyone’s unmasked, vaguely middle aged and pointing out to the water. We see blood in the grass, Red, visions of big red ships melting in the river. But there’s a dude dressed in blue and leaning against the brick, saying,
That’s Blue Angels, man, Thunderbirds. That’s the military’s Essential Worker Air Show.
So we cross the bridge as jets boom above us. They drape chem trails over the water, like sedatives we think, and all these people seem so proud of it. Like they’re screaming, clapping, like as if the flight costs couldn’t cover a whole year’s rent for all of us. As if our collecting on the bridge isn’t making death and work so much worse.
We know we need to sleep, that rest is in itself a form of protest, but we’re scared, Red, we’re pissed, so we ride straight to the Little Red Lighthouse. We go until we’re barely breathing, and while coasting uptown we find someone looking just like you below the cathedral’s round rose window.
You’re pregnant, Red, you’re beautiful. You’re playing that famous violin and singing a poem about a blue Amarante blooming. When we ask your dog’s name, you say,
Mauve, man, and my daughter will be Canyon. But what I need to remind you is how the stained glass in the south transept depicted this Apocalypse. How, really fucking soon, I’ll be giving birth to this baby alone.
Your dog’s eyes are more white than blue, and as it howls you say, Never mind, man, we’re just hungry. Please, anything helps.
So we give you everything we have, drop all our coins into your sunhat, and over dinner Dolly asks us what we learned today. We don’t say much, just kind of stare into the candlelight, so Dolly explains how Capital continuously brings forth living offspring. How it exploits individual freedoms in order to breed. How, in this process, individuals become the genitals of Capital.
We feel vacant, Red, like empty. Like as if time were a broken bottle and we’ve been tasked with gluing it back. Or like if inside us there was this forest, this really black thicket, and after trying all night we still can’t find our way out.
All we want is to hug you, Red. To hug and kiss our brother. We love you both too much, and all of us is hurting.
Dyl