Matthew Rohrer

I wake up, bound tightly. A warm, valerian smell cascades to my palate. I can only move my eyelids and toes. Heat sits impishly on my chest, at my throat, curtains of it brushing against me. Panic creeps out of my armpits. I can only move my eyelids and toes, and this constant fluttering lulls me to sleep. I awake late and move like a bee through the apartment, from station to station from the blue flame to the shimmering disc. From the stairs to the street, to the grocery store. To the meat aisle. To the cocktail wieners. To make pigs-in-a-blanket, to share them with friends. To sink into bed, to bind myself tightly in blankets, to flutter off into sleep, and then on past sleep, to be carried by admirers across a wooden bridge. Later I will burn this bridge.

They learned to turn off the gravity in an auditorium and we all rose into the air, the same room where they demonstrated pow-wows and prestidigitation. But not everyone believed it. That was the most important lesson I learned—that a truck driven by a dog could roll down a hill at dusk and roll right off a dock into a lake and sink, and if no one believes you then what is the point of telling them wonderful things? I walked home from the pow-wow on an early winter night in amazement: they let me buy the toy tomahawk! As soon as I got home I was going to hit my sister with it, but I didn’t know this.

is an imaginary flower that never fades. The amaranth is blue with black petals, it’s yellow with red petals, it’s enormous and grows into the shape of a girl’s house, the seeds nestle high in the closet where she hid a boy. The boy and his bike flee the girl’s parents from the tip of the leaves, green summer light behind the veins. The amaranth is an imaginary flower in the shape of a girl’s house dispensing gin and tonics from its thorns, a succulent. This makes the boy’s bike steer off-course all summer, following the girl in her marvelous car, the drunken bike. He was a small part of summer, he was summer’s tongue.