Atlas and Alice, Issue 18
Carl Boon
The Other America When I was tender in the breasts and still fourteen, I started sticking pins in the numb flesh of my elbows. And because it didn’t hurt the way I needed, I set fires in my bedroom, small ones at first, hymn book pages, Barbie hair, Popsicle sticks. I didn’t want to die, but I wanted to know how death might feel, the stagnant knees, the shouts from the farthest room fading. On my fifteenth birthday I blackmailed the druggist for a bottle of Secanol and listened to President Johnson on TV until his voice became banjos in Arkansas, slow and holy sex with the boy on Summit who didn’t know my name. Instead of being there, I dreamed Vietnam, green consumed by blue and purple flowers,
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