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D. S. Waldman

On Ego

Instead, let the wind take your name
                        a tress of someone else’s hair
 
            and rush out the dusking window.
 
Welcome the swollen evening
                        clouds crawling up the river
 
            the chill that finds you in bed.
 
Miles into a stolid city
                        breath muffled between brick and steam
 
            a mirror waits for you to pass,
 
to look or not look at yourself,
                        to sharpen or soften your eyes
 
            or to glide past like a shadow.
 
You’ll find it’s not about the light
                        but how much it conceals from you
 
            depending on where you stand.
 
You’ll find a mirror is a choice
                        a reality to consider
 
            a truth it’s your privilege to ignore.
 
Did you feel it? — your name
                        vanishing from the language
 
            exiting through the last wink of sun,
 
the transfer of enormous weight
                        from your cracked and crumbling plinth
 
            to the globed shoulders of twilight.
 
You realize you’ve been drowning
                        in air, white and odorless
 
            lungs glutted with that familiar silk,
 
a name you’ve been answering to
                        quietly panicked, grasping
 
            for the taut rim of your mouth,
 
a sky livid with purple clouds
                        humming in and around you --
 
            Do it! Pluck the guitar string
 
let it overcome your soft skull
                        the way starlight spreads like oil
 
            across a wrinkled river,
 
all of your folds and crevasses,
                        discovering the absences
 
            that disguise themselves as bone,
 
Chorus of watery moans
                        stolen into the tissue
 
            of your ravenous longing.
 
And as the night draws into you
                        drains you of your resistance
 
            a stranger will present himself,
 
a shadow in the mirror
                        born from the delicate light
 
            of an infant constellation.
 
He will have your square jaw
                        your broad chest, spacious posture
 
            he will have nothing but time.
 
Patient and bituminous.
                        I wonder how long it will take
 
            for your gaze to melt towards him,
 
for you to raise your hand to his
                        and see for the very first time
 
            that your bones glow in the dark.

Biography

D.S. Waldman is a writer, painter, and wanderer based in the foothills of the Los Padres National Forest in Ojai, California. Finalist for the 2019 New Writers Story Prize, his work has appeared in the Tulip Tree Review and the Mojave Heart Review. He holds a B.A. from Middlebury College and will be enrolling in the MFA program at San Diego State University this fall.
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    • Serenity
    • Issue 17
    • The Audio Room
    • Issue 16
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    • Play It Again
    • Issue 13
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    • Issue 6
    • Hand to Mouth
    • Issue 5
    • Issue 4
    • Issue 3
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    • Issue 1
  • Submissions