perhappened mag
issue 14: HIDE & SEEK
defiant secular misery
fights astrology with
a folding chair
ALEXANDER ATHANAIL
Tonight, we murder all the lights in the sky.
The city tosses a martini glass full of fluorescence in their eyes and I laugh.
You go, girl.
She grabs Centauri by the hair and shoves his face
into a bucket of smog.
His siblings beg for mercy so she lets his head
come up just long enough for me to whisper in his ear,
I know you don’t know anything.
I don't give a fuck about your answers,
more than once I’ve nailed my heart to a telephone pole and heard nothing
but the flipping of pages, the shuffling of a deck of cards
by hands that have nothing to spare for anything as starved as mine.
Jupiter puts up a fight,
but Mercury
is a little bitch.
Too scrawny for his own sky,
you wouldn’t blame him for my bones on your nightstand.
So I pry off another metacarpal and say, here, I will sell this to you
for nothing but your expression when you take it from me.
Tuck it away.
Listen to it rattling against your silverware
when I think of breaking myself on the subway.
I get home at five a.m. and the sky is empty.
That helps.
I don’t want to remember when I looked up and everything made sense for the last time.
There was no lattice in the stars, only
so much dark between them that I could have vanished
and left behind every weak flutter of love like a ribbon drifting on the ocean’s cheek
while I sank out of everything and everyone.
Nothing mattered to all that dark with light just dust on its cape.
But I held my feet
because the road beneath them was only mine,
and because
I thought of you, how
in all that dark
we were both here,
floating in it.
We might as well have been holding hands.
The city tosses a martini glass full of fluorescence in their eyes and I laugh.
You go, girl.
She grabs Centauri by the hair and shoves his face
into a bucket of smog.
His siblings beg for mercy so she lets his head
come up just long enough for me to whisper in his ear,
I know you don’t know anything.
I don't give a fuck about your answers,
more than once I’ve nailed my heart to a telephone pole and heard nothing
but the flipping of pages, the shuffling of a deck of cards
by hands that have nothing to spare for anything as starved as mine.
Jupiter puts up a fight,
but Mercury
is a little bitch.
Too scrawny for his own sky,
you wouldn’t blame him for my bones on your nightstand.
So I pry off another metacarpal and say, here, I will sell this to you
for nothing but your expression when you take it from me.
Tuck it away.
Listen to it rattling against your silverware
when I think of breaking myself on the subway.
I get home at five a.m. and the sky is empty.
That helps.
I don’t want to remember when I looked up and everything made sense for the last time.
There was no lattice in the stars, only
so much dark between them that I could have vanished
and left behind every weak flutter of love like a ribbon drifting on the ocean’s cheek
while I sank out of everything and everyone.
Nothing mattered to all that dark with light just dust on its cape.
But I held my feet
because the road beneath them was only mine,
and because
I thought of you, how
in all that dark
we were both here,
floating in it.
We might as well have been holding hands.
Alexander is a thing of Brooklyn who enjoys desecrating legal pads and tormenting his cherished friends with the absurdities born thereof. He lives with four cats and the usual number of hands. For proof, you can follow him on Instagram @talldarkanddark and Twitter @talldarkanddark.