By Reid Maruyama
it’s farther up the road, it’s well past midnight, it’s so far past midnight it’s practically morning, and all the school children are getting on the bus or have already gotten on the bus, and now they are getting off the bus, as the rush hour traffic begins and the radio tells us all your political darlings are dead, so here is your birth certificate with everything blacked out but the year of your birth, even though i’m not driving, i try to define a space where the flowers in this field wave like miniaturized flags, even though you would probably be mad if i told you the field was not actually a field but a room, and the flowers not actually flowers but crumpled fists of tissue paper, though i swear this is not a masturbation joke, nor are these tears, nor is it a cry for help, it’s a box of bullets, never mind, it’s land mines, never mind, it’s the pledge of allegiance, and all the school children are standing at their desks, now they are hiding beneath them, now it’s the image of the modern era, an image of an image of an image of a bleeding heart, it’s a beautiful morning.
Reid Maruyama was born in Santa Cruz, California and is currently living, like everyone else, in a vast soup of panic and terror.
Art by Jeff Kallet.