James Hoch

Perhaps you covet something of its emptiness, its uselessness in matters of  yearning or feeling another’s yearn, that it can’t know a damn thing, yet damns everything it touches: the water it gathers along its passage, the air it pushes through, swallow-like. It is no bird, though you envy the song you hear only after it’s gone, even if  it sings through paper, a goat, the neck of a man wearing a scarf that tufts just as the rest of   him flies out of his shoes and collapses in dirt. Or, how it is like the dirt receiving him, the privilege of not knowing if   he was kind or unkind, as you chamber another, waiting for someone to come for his shoes.

Like nights we knelt on the dirt floor of a dugout, leaned our heads back, eyes twitching gone, and popped nitrous canisters into the communion shapes of our mouths, slipped inside where everything seemed to be falling snow, ice, the time split between chasing flies through a darkened park and sprawling in sycamore bark—how clean that abyss we drifted in, like dew, more like pollen, on our skins; and, beneath, a want for touch, a kiss, a return. Like nothing back then, to break an arm latching on to the bumper of an Impala, or settling back as the car took us as far as the salted bridge, before letting the ride go with a mitten caught behind the chrome waving from the other side of the river.Like this, you said, sliding a needle, watching dope plunge, the body's rush and tow until you felt something like an angel hovering above, but it was only pigeon feathers deviling the air. Those friends are gone: some dead, dying, locked up or jailed in themselves; and when I see some kids running in the heat of a taillight swirling behind them, I remember we wanted only to quiet our bodies, their unnatural hum, a vague pull inward, some thin furrows gliding over the snow.