The East Village



Aidan Thompson


from A kind in glass and a cousin


[...] Knowledge derived from literature can modify the color of your
eyes, the way an ocean's blueness is assumed from the sky. Refraction
is understanding undertone as it swerves with perception, allowing us
to enter without the last word. Finally, we lined the wet syllables on
the halyard hoping their sounds would stop being polite and breathe
into sails of inspiration. They became an extraordinary sentence when
we counted naturally by one, one, one. One small gull rises, caresses
and resists the wind. Where is the word before we speak it? The infant
drops out of the womb as an old man remembering for the last time. We
once pulled kelp along the beach in cardigan sweaters knitted by
arthritic fingers, giving us unaccountable gratitude. He slipped her
hand in his, and with fewer than two words there was a collection of
jokes essential for all autobiographies. Cooking has the same effect,
the way throwing eggs in a pan gives you an awareness of sizzle,
enlarging possibility with onomatopoeia. "No more complicated ideas!"
yelled the man in the inner tube, cigar between thumb and index, eyes
itching with illumination. Years later he hesitated before painting a
woman with multiple brows­her mouth floating in the space under her
ear. "I like their way of moving around," she said, "It's this
generation's way of doing that described thing." Of course we all knew
what she was talking about, but lacked a vocabulary for unceasing
coincidence. Who said accidents are personal? Creativity is gathering
in the cabbage patch amid foliage's flurry next to a stump. Art has an
enduring bark that reaches around the tinge of thoughts, as
strawberries' rawness on a bush will entice a child to scrawl in red.
Consequently, he announced that he was born Cesarean and she collected
ads for psychoanalysis, hoping for a secret of her own. [...]  

Volume Twelve Index