David Eileen
Paracme
To say this word like an earthling, silently leave the blue room of your longing.
Slip from the hotel-cold corridor, white linen drowsy at your shoulders. This word is tricky:
it is not spelled in the bar codes your blinds produce. Your imagination—particularly
its accountant’s skill for torture—is also not the etymology of this word. Much colder
still is the container of its meaning: you leave the room. Hot sidewalk under your feet, you brave
the yard, then the city lines, leave the unincorporated outskirts. Your clothes bundled
at the foot of a mountain. Government documents sublimated into kindling. This word is defined
by what you do with the ashes. This word is green that fights after burning & the spoil
coming after the green & still it echoes in the blue room of your longing, that room
you cannot return to, as changed as you are.
Internecine
When saying this word, imagine sleeping on a bed of metal clothes hangers. You bend
them out of shape; they sew you open. Nobody’s happy. Acceptable synonyms: hangnails, strip
malls, the fold in your face that hangs skin over disgust. On this planet, the word most literally
translates to business as usual. The real power of this word is that, in conjunction with this planet,
it will inspire you to invent new crimes & new punishments. Even so, refrain from saying
people who roll coal should be sentenced to five minutes of duct-tape-to-tailpipe in a mouthy
kind of way at dinner parties, or barbecues, or town hall meetings. Maybe don’t say it in church,
either, or at those aforementioned strip malls. Come to think of it, maybe just make a t-shirt.
Draw your new law from pit to pit. When you start to get uncomfortable about where the fabric
paint & cotton underneath come from, you are approaching native fluency.
David Eileen lives in the mountains of western Virginia. Their writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Diagram, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Best of the Net, among others, with more shared at www.david-eileen.com.
