"For the purest sound,you can’t sing at the notes;
you have to sing through them." There were nights I said yes when I didn’t want to say yes, nights my body floated above itself and didn’t come back. I like to imagine where I went instead. Maybe wandering the city. Maybe folded, tiny, into a watch ticking deafening ticks. Maybe I just went home. But you have to do the work, they say, if you’re going to do the work. So let the body return and work: There were nights I said yes when I didn’t want to say yes. Nights I opened my safest parts to hands that would steal them and helped pack the boxes. To say it happened this way is, in itself, a kind of forgiveness. The body returns and I tell the stories: the nights I said yes, the nights I stayed, the nights I did not. I saw them recently, the hands. They looked like hands, like my hands. No claws. Things happen and then they don’t anymore, and leaving them behind, too, is a kind of homecoming. The body comes back into itself, the work begins, something else truly ends. There were nights I did not get to say no. When I think of them now, they’re a row of watches on a table, all the batteries dead, all telling the same time, none of them today.
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Lewis MundtLewis Mundt is a writer, producer, and publisher living in Minneapolis. His writing has appeared in or on Paper Darts, Revolver, and The Rumpus, among others, and his debut collection The God of the Whole Animal was released in 2015. He has a lot of jobs, one of which is producing and hosting the New Sh!t Show Minneapolis, where he gets to make very loud, very bad jokes at strangers who clap. More at lewismundt.com, and more bad jokes on Twitter (@beardpoetry). |