Glazing and glistening grey clouds clot and rust over the city Like dreams pouring from the steel mills and Spilling their detritus. Red-black smoke thickens like scabs, Suffocating lives and dreams. This was where I worked one summer because my old man Told me to. Me, all tender behind the ears, Naked white and barely shaving, Nineteen years old and totally innocent of the ways of the World. The shoes I wore were Steel-plated in the toes to prevent my little footsies from being Crushed, Should gravity bring a beam or a box or a barrel barrelling down. Furnaces burn the incense of hell, Red with angry scourging heat, As fierce and frantic fires melt the ore And birth it into steel for buildings, for furniture, for cars, for staplers, for lamps, for file cabinets, For glowering skyscrapers, For bridges, for trucks, for catwalks. Me, afraid that the furnace-sparks will Light me up and burn me and Ruin my day, As I try my best to coagulate from the world of innocence to the world of experience. A world built on steel, Hard, impervious, tough, Cold to the touch. Steel spans and chokes the globe– The hard edge of a hard civilization. Will no one say I care, And whisper somewhere beneath this conglomeration That things are not as they gleam?
Christopher Johnson is a writer based in the Chicago area. He’s been a merchant seaman, a high school English teacher, a corporate communications writer, a textbook editor, an educational consultant, and a free-lance writer. He’s published short stories, articles, and essays in The Progressive, Snowy Egret, Earth Island Journal, Chicago Wilderness, American Forests, Chicago Life, Across the Margin, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Blue Lake Review, The Literary Yard, Scarlet Leaf Review, Spillwords Press, Fiction on the Web, Sweet Tree Review, and other journals and magazines. In 2006, the University of New Hampshire Press published his book, This Grand and Magnificent Place: The Wilderness Heritage of the White Mountains. His second book, which he co-authored with a prominent New Hampshire forester named David Govatski, was Forests for the People: The Story of America’s Eastern National Forests, published by Island Press in 2013.
You can find more of Christopher’s work here on Ink Pantry.
The wind is still screaming against the windowpanes- radio-statics pitched a little too high and wavering like wildflower-dandelions in yesterday’s storm, and I wonder whose screams got carried away by the wind before they could echo into their own hands (and maybe they’re all lost forever- too entangled in wind-shrieks to be pulled back; maybe the music will be left unheard)
I heard that birds have hollow bones- a necessary equipment for flight-life, you see, & so maybe they hollowed out their hearts and the secrets left in-between scattered bones, and I wonder if the wind was just a quirky-collector of life- maybe she picked up the trash and flew into her own flight, Filling her hollow body with secrets of another, maybe she was in search of a new ‘her’
Love, I must leave, we’re covered in lichen, the kind found fogging a graveyard address that draws you close to decipher the writing
of praises for people we never knew. Love, I must leave, I’ve trodden on tombstones and questioned if eulogies are ever true.
Love, I must leave, the letters are burning and someone should summon the fire brigade to quench old flames and stop them returning
in the gowns of girls they impersonate. Love, I must leave, the mist has just thickened, the clock has just struck, it’s almost too late.
Don’t wave goodbye, don’t try to figure me. Love, I must leave, to rewrite a history.
Outside Of History
After many a summer time must have a stop: an empty stage and a canopy hung starless. Aldous Huxley’s dying and Kennedy’s been shot; the United States are watching Dallas.
He asks his wife to tip the boy two dollars for delivery of the oxygen tank; there’s an infinite succession of tomorrows that Huxley is attempting to outflank.
The worn out stoic, the literary gent; something of a saint or bodhisattva, undertaking a brave new experiment to illuminate the world that lies thereafter.
Idolaters venerate the sacred ground of some Golden Age or Utopia; only outside of history is goodness found and mankind is a martyr to myopia.
The Western world murders a scarecrow saviour and confabulates a Cuban connection; a fine day to sneak underneath the radar and disappear through the doors of perception.
Fortified by pain relief and LSD, he floats upon the pleasure dome waves. There’s no heaven or hell, just eternity. Yet perhaps there is an entity that saves?
Not Mohammed, Jehovah, Krishna or Buddha, nor these nightmarish machinations; not these temples and schemes for a perfect future, just this emptiness enhanced by medication.
Ray Miller is a Socialist, Aston Villa supporter, and faithful husband. Life’s been a disappointment.
You can find more of Ray’s work here on Ink Pantry.
Walking in early light, wetlands a short drive from home, where, like the rest of the world, all is quietly closing due to this ravening plague, part of my way parallel to a usually busy highway. I think of another road, traffic-choked, in my distant past. Figuring the year I last drove it those miles ago, I reach back, meet my younger self who casts several glances at my now thin hair, assessing the ruin.
His surprise at where I live now sweetened knowing how long he shall last, he thinks the nearby gas fields recently discovered that he read about must be the reason: employment. All he has known so far is an expectation of work. I paraphrase how, why, I landed here, both linked to my late education, love, work, try to explain about these three life effects felt by most. Stunned, even excited, by where his life leads, he now wants to hear of my health, journey. Happiness.
He knows about the Spanish ‘flu, read that, too, seems more fascinated than horror-stricken by brief news of today’s scourge, but he is young. His skin fascinates me. I tell him everybody would be relieved if this present canker’s naked statistics we absorb like poison, minus the personal misery, grief, and despair, doesn’t exceed that post-WW1 mortality rate. He mentions being concerned for nothing about the nukes, thinks self-isolation, overrun intensive-care facilities, the end of sport, non-electric entertainment, connection – this propels his interest into overdrive – sounds like a fantastic movie script. He loves dystopian themes. I tell him there are more coming. I know from inside knowledge he prefers damaging news told straight, yet want to protect him, protect hope, that lifeblood. Is he too young to be thinking of worldwide virulence?
I cross the highway listening for the odd vehicle, move deeper into the salutary peace of the natural world, but see few birds. Even they seem to have shut up shop, except for a lone pelican, its exquisite wake. Cheer up, my young companion urges, slowing for me, you did so much, although it sounds like you stuffed up a lot. Ah, the chirpy ignorance of youth. How should this end? Endings trouble me.
Hitchhiker’s Paradise
A haphazard reader as a boy I wanted to drive a bus, then to embrace glory representing my country at sport, then again, in my youth, to become an actor via some miracle. Time on my side until I took my eyes off it, I read among a crazy assortment of books including atlases, one by a British writer of American crime about driving through every state during the nineteen-fifties. Exploring America’s vast geographical and cultural gallimaufry became a forlorn wish as time turned against me. Another wish is to remember that writer’s name, find an old second-hand copy of his travel book online.
I read Kerouac, a different spaced-out hedonistic glory, imagining myself a hitchhiker resembling young Paul Newman in The Long Hot Summer, cool On the Road like Sal Paradise in Big Sur where punctuation took a vacation. The comfort of books became a de facto method of feeling the sun on my face until an opportunity to visit America as a volunteer worker opened up. Falling ill en route, unable to immediately honour my contract, I was sacked a couple of weeks after arriving. The driver of my short-lived employers, dumping me at a motel for one pre-paid night, pissed off by my treatment, asked what I would do now that I was recovering. Not sure, I replied. Ever think of hitchhiking? he said. You’d meet people. Americans are better than this.
A short walk from the motel, unsure of the direction my thumb hankered towards after experiencing the unexpected, I plunged into the wonderful relief freedom affords, this adventure’s distillation having taken years like a fine malt whiskey, unplanned yet not so. Travelling the other way, a tall black guy, perhaps a basketballer standing, torso visible through a sunroof, pointed to a car braked some distance beyond me. Hefting my pack, a small tent stowed, risking what? my long-lulled nerves? I lumbered on shaky legs into time stilled forever in memory now, somewhere in upstate N.Y., heading north, I guessed correctly, heart a skittering mouse as I disappeared into America’s pulsing hinterland.
Ian C Smith’s work has been published in Antipodes, BBC Radio 4 Sounds,The Dalhousie Review, Griffith Review, San Pedro River Review, Southword, The Stony Thursday Book, & Two Thirds North. His seventh book, wonder sadness madness joy, is published by Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.
