Body Politic

by Matthew Roy ​ What was the point of it all, if it was always eternity on either side? A blip and a pulse and nothingness at either end of the street. It haunts me. # It is the cold light of god’s-eye Polaris, watching as I trudge across a midnight field. # It is the smell of government buildings in winter, the silent track of a comet carrying its story across dead cosmos, hanging over us like a bad omen. # She cut her fingers on a razor blade deep in the darkness of her handbag when she reached for the dried indigo flower she kept to mark a place in her Bible. A gasp and a welling of blood quickly pinched off by panicked fingers. # These are the things she said to me, a grocery list of grievances and whispered heretic references to Nod. Forgive me my imprudence. I am a novice in these matters politic. I’ll fade with time. # The military history of South Africa; the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine; the fabled land of sleep: these were the thoughts dancing through her distracted mind. # I felt an acrimonious divorce of function and style. The frustration found only in stalled art. # hang me from a lamppost riddle me with bullets i am not what you think and my heart bangs alone against meat and pleural space on a shared rock tumbling through endless dark, the stars so distant and unreachable they might as well not exist at all # she handed me the bloodied flower marker and her dried blood and indigo powder from the flower rubbed off onto my fingers leaving a living stain but like all things organic it will fade with time

Matthew Roy (he/him) is a resident of the American Midwest. He recently moved from a small town to a big city, from a rambling farmhouse to a tiny apartment, and from a major corporation to an up-and-comer. He meets people for a living and escapes into books and poetry in the silence of the night. He's writing more. He’s making changes. His work has appeared in Eternal Haunted Summer, The Quarter(ly) Journal, and So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library.