Union Transfer, Year of the Ox, Cosmo Randazzo

UNION TRANSFER

Cosmo Randazzo

Somewhere, in Philadelphia, lives an unread emotion. As a writer, you either find it, or imagine it so hard that you nearly burst a blood vessel, in which case a narrative is born. It’s a birth unsightly; it is marker on mahogany, and the sweat that passes a singer’s ear as they recite lyrics, stacked neatly on tempos we count by way of our own heart beats, but never out loud.

In this case, what are we enumerating, when we arrive? Does time stutter in the wake of our own personal interval? When they first amalgamated the theory to suffering, to exclusion, to complete futility, they avoided the way a human body can endure electric pains beyond the stacked sense of an abacus spine, beyond a threat to one-hundred and seventy-three other glass bones, and beyond the plain tally of a woven scar. Emotion, non-quantum and everywhere at once, is the first thing to leave us as we retire from non-existence, spitting and crying for life, and the last thing to leave, too, when from the greatest womb we ultimately retire. Zero, and infinity. The marker runs out, someday, never. Who’s counting?

God—whatever this is to you—is a writer, whose biography for us fluctuates between an ode and an obituary, without changing tone, without skipping a beat. Mathematicians, I am afraid, have no place in the Holy Land, much less under our ribs, or between beams of stage lighting. Here, we are all the unread emotions of a universe with no music, no bathroom stall.

221 Mixed & Matched

YEAR OF THE OX

Cosmo Randazzo

One year ago, I wrote, “One year ago, I was so far deep into depression that I couldn’t see my own feet, two yards below my eyes and wandering. Now, I am whole. Confident, laughing, waiting for an epidemic.”

A year before that, “It’s a containment I can’t quite touch and a quarantine in the making, but I should sleep while I can still breathe.”

A year before that, “I don’t know how much longer I can do this.”

The anniversary of me and mine, Satirical in its tequila and leap-year roots, Romantical beyond that, Respect at its heavenly core.

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Before that: The virulent date of a shelter-in-place, A displacement of joy that had only Just reached my knees, Goosebumps on hold; Paused escape from depressive episodes, once Unkindly rewound and replayed For TV dinner dinner-times, Bookless sons and sick checkers.

Before that: Year of the Year of the Ox, The edge of a billowing spring, All back muscles tense and torn From the Rat’s blistering grip.

Before that: Looking at the centered sun, To the tune of Strawberry Fields, From the surface of a planet whose Last revolution was bereaved of a Grandfather, his music, his submarine; We are captainless and healing.

Before that: January first, then second, Then something.

223 Mixed & Matched