Late Night Phone Call

he is twelve years old
a white boy from Schaumburg, Illinois
with a sloppy barber’s buzz cut

somewhere
in his surveillance-skunked skin
he’s been soaked in enough small screen and YouTube
to know he will tell this story on a date one day
knows the date will understand and maybe laugh along, by then, and even share his own
and once again, perhaps
and then he will not need to announce it anymore
Somewhere
furrowed in his frame, his fortitude
he knows he is, in fact, allowed
he even apprehends that no one has authority to grant permission anyway

But he is only twelve
he’s only twenty-four
he’s only nine years old
He just had his 50th birthday
His retirement party
His bar mitzvah
Just went away to college
Celebrated two decades of marriage
a year of sobriety last Saturday
Watched the birth of his nephew
his granddaughter
his sons
Mourned his mother’s death
his father’s
his lover’s
had a sexual encounter with a woman
and enjoyed himself
Fell in love with two men at the same time
and didn’t tell anyone
He wrote it on his flesh

Inside, his organs are stopped with oratory
prose
he digests a manuscript
written in blotted ink
cursive
careful calligraphy
carvings etched into his esophagus
helvetica and andale mono
american typewriter inserting impression after impression in the walls of his intestines
a, s, d, f
j, k, l, semicolon
a, s, d, f
j, k, l, semicolon
over and over, up and down the 5-9 meters, indenting the folds and furrows of his GI tract
The whole of his endoskeleton is transparent text
if you turned him inside out we could read everything real about him up on the powerpoint screen if only I had a projector handy
and it was the size of a football field

It’s three in the morning
middle of October somewhere in Ohio
and he sits on the gravel in the parking lot of an elementary school
tailbone tight against the ground
doubled-over
arms arched across his torso to hold the inside in
barbershop broomstick by his feet, bloody
above him is the hollowed shell of a pay phone
just a pole stuck into an empty shoe box
he stares at it, maybe he can wish it into being again
because all he wants to do is make a late night phone call
and go back home


The prompt "write about a late night phone call" comes from A Writer's Book of Days