Issue 7 - December 2020
A Walk Through Fingerprints By Toni Brennan
How do I define the seasons as they change... I can’t return these last few months— The receipts are lost to the way I move with this glacier stuck in my personal space and the coins in the pockets of this place seem to only cover eyes of faces that had the range to generalize the death of a World. And I don’t mean the universe, I don’t mean the planet or an ecosystem. I mean the death of an individual; World, as their nervous system is dragged through courtrooms scathed by the idea of simply existing as a figment. The debate over pigment—just go on and tear another ligament from the lineage as if they won’t recall the feel of empty condolences nicking the fingertips of a World... A mother once held. A lover once kissed. A World—to only be missed. I cant return these past few months as parts of me, alive and dead, mindlessly float with the bacteria and degradation that comes with blowing through seasons as if there are an infinite amount of them. Now in collective hiding, yet still trying to find myself in the blur of a time cloud overhead. We ride the grey mass in a multitude of blue skies, honoring the skyline with those who have run out of time. Feeling for that sweet spot of memory in succession where we can glide through the seasons of spring, summer, winter, second winter, third winter until we fall.
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And if I fall onto concrete and not leaves with comrades who look like me and those who don’t— I wonder who will be engraved to the sky graves of foggy exhaust laid by an airplane that still misspells their name. We try to skip summer. Just like several states skip out on the mandate that comes with the possible escape to you claiming you can’t breathe through a piece of fabric thinner than the belief that everyone must go on with their life as if this... is all there is. Why don’t we sit with that. To believe oppression rests right under your uncovered noses where air has the same budget of a funeral covered with roses. Watch how empathy and compassion decompose in the face of what you chose and what is said at the cemetery about your heart existing a mere foot away from your protruding nose. But that’s just how it goes, no? People are dying, believe that. People are dying through seasons and summer was coexisting with sweltering heat and the crippling silence of children once screaming in sprinklers. These Worlds fill communities; where most are dying, the rest outdoor dining but those Worlds will be the ones to lead us into a terrene where fear and politicians are obsolete from whose streets!— I still hear children crying because these big thinkers contemplate a life while nine more show up at their doorstep with the same sentence to say, “go figures— took you long enough.”
