Michael Mirolla – p. 20

The Red Chair

for D

How much depends on a chair’s ruby redness? There’ll soon come a time when only your ghost will sit in that chair. Fitting slot-like along the two indent-scars left by years of raw femur rubbing on faux leather. And, like you, she’ll be but partly there, to flit between worlds forever out of focus.

Red chair … chair-y red … not quite a wheelbarrow. For now, metal legs scraping on tile, you pull yourself toward the table’s oval-tine edge. Where, framed by a 50-year journey from teen- to diaper-hood, medicinal peace awaits: A purified glass of water to wash down the magic pills that keep your voices at bay.

Reverse: There is no red without its chair. Closer. Come closer. Don’t let the echoes that sweat through chained-down hallways rob you of your appetite. Even if the memories rise to enfold you like a suffocating blanket. Even if they hold you down while wet sheets Are molded into the shape of your face.

Take the scarlet from the heart if need be. A muted Gilligan; a tongue-tied Fonz. It is lonely now that those voices seldom speak. To you. They have left you with nothing to say, haven’t they? Unable to respond. Only a crooked smile, a shuffling gait and a stare aimed at some place still electrode-attached.

And make sure the chair shines forever bright. There’ll soon come a time when there’ll be no time. When the rings fall off those shard-like fingers. But even as the flesh that connects you to troubled dreams melts away, remember the go-go dancer in the nightclub window. Wild gyrations above a jealous earth.

Basudhara Roy

Self: An Understudy

My parents accuse me of inconsistency.

Some days, I am as good as gold, scoring the best there is to be scored.

On others, I will underperform, grow imperturbable, indifferent to performance.

Inconsistency, they believe, is what keeps me from going places.

I want to tell them about things I am consistent at.

I consistently break down to pieces, consistently give refuge to the dark.

I consistently let melancholy fill my potholes, succumb consistently to loss.

In every relationship I have been in, I am consistently the most dispensable.

When the wagon is full and in want of space, I am consistently the one to be left behind.

But my parents will understand none of this, having taught me to expect love as a right.

They who never had to choose over me in this world – I, being their only child.