City Brink is the literary magazine of Harry S. Truman College, a part of the broader group known as Chicago City Colleges. In the Fall 2018 issue, City Brink published "The Landscape of Tattooed Arms," a short piece that appeared by the choice of student editors. As you know, scar rhymes with star.
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THE LANDSCAPE OF TATTOOED ARMS
I read from a tattered book the following poem as I wait. People tell me the words once had a message of great import to an entire generation in the past, but I grasp nothing of it. I can't reach what the ancient author wants me to know. I think this is so because, today, nothing is the same as it was before the war. So I read and do not understand when the poet writes...
Be like stars, real in sight. Hound the margins.
Which city lights, like stars, belong to you? Claim what you will,
The scat singer says.
Which of us go on to heaven and which are proscribed for hell?
Even scars from a hundred years ago make new skin that mimics
Their form.
The scar is permanent. Remains in spite of new skin.
So be like stars. Real in sight of hounds. The margins float
Inside old stories told in nameless lies.
And dragons set sail amid the dust and smoke of industrial might.
The forceful germ.
The silent knife.
The not-so-subtle gun at night.
No. I'm sorry. Is that poetry? I close the book and lean my head against the filthy wall. I can't understand a word of it and this bus terminal smells like wet ground. And no one is clean. Everyone is angry about the mysteries that plague them. And the ceiling above is caved-in at the end of the waiting room, where a mass of boughs and limbs and roots hang down from the vegetation that has colonized the long-neglected roof. The light that comes from the unwilling sun above is lost, tangled in it too. And beneath this organic death clutch, the floor is covered in broken stones, shards of dried mud, disintegrating bits of tile, broken frames, and unwanted rubble everyone must navigate. Birds, trapped beneath the ceiling, flit desperate to find good water. Black as bats.
Moss grows in corners. Mold reaches up the walls toward empty windows. The doors here are broken forever. And there is safety in being unseen. No one looks at anyone else here.
I sit, having returned from the wars in the back alleys, the unforgiving streets, only a little man. Waiting for my bus. My clothes in a neat square bundle in my lap.
In the end my bus huffs slow and hard next to the platform. The wheels squealing for lack of oil. I clutch my square box of clothes and mingle with the others waiting to get on. We are planets hiding our scars. Trying to hide the wounds we've given to others. If we stay seated we will all be invisible. It's an old remedy.
The world will end in a bus station, a spiral galaxy waiting for the planets to board. Then a short ride to the port city I grew up in and still try to call my home, where they will grab me and feed me lies.
The world will end in a salvo of guns aimed at the advancing line of soldiers in static array. They say you are absolved of the sin of killing when it is done for flag and country. Soldiers know this is the first of all the great national lies. There are no names for days in the smoke. It's not a Friday or any day at all. Only the war. The sun is here and then it is not.
The world will end on a Saturday when you least expect it. It will end as my foot touches the third step up into the high bus. There. It ended a second ago. Did anyone notice? Everything that follows isn't real. I find a seat next to the window to watch what is left of us.
I float inside the crystal ball beside the snow, watching resin houses in pastel regalia go by. No one ever comes out of them. Plastic toys cannot be made to talk. I can still see his face as the blood ran out of his open stomach. My masterpiece, sanctioned for my sanity, it is said.
In the dark the blue machine begins to operate the rhythm of my heart until what blood I have is not my own. Like what a drum can do when you sit too close and it substitutes itself for the heartbeat. And your head hurts in places no massage can reach and if you're not careful you will find yourself sitting on a curb and hanging your head, watching children make a game of running headlong into moving trucks.
The dark hides nothing and means even less as you fly past it, safe behind the window of the bus. It seems to highlight blue steel with a light that has no source. Shines out of empty nothing. Reflects back to black. Comes from nowhere. Settles on the back of my empty hand. There is no future left. I will eat and sleep and I will walk as if in a red mist.
I keep listening for a note I can recognize as the water towers and piles of railroad ties drift by. Supplies staged for the next great assault. Coffins at the ready. It is not a tragedy. We love it this way. We built it this way. If we didn't like it this way, we would have changed it long before the age of exploration.
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The Landscape of Tattooed Arms
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City Brink is the literary magazine of Harry S. Truman College, a part of the broader group known as Chicago City Colleges. In the Fall 2018 issue, City Brink published "The Landscape of Tattooed Arms," a short piece that appeared by the choice of student editors. As you know, scar rhymes with star.
---------
THE LANDSCAPE OF TATTOOED ARMS
I read from a tattered book the following poem as I wait. People tell me the words once had a message of great import to an entire generation in the past, but I grasp nothing of it. I can't reach what the ancient author wants me to know. I think this is so because, today, nothing is the same as it was before the war. So I read and do not understand when the poet writes...
Be like stars, real in sight. Hound the margins.
Which city lights, like stars, belong to you? Claim what you will,
The scat singer says.
Which of us go on to heaven and which are proscribed for hell?
Even scars from a hundred years ago make new skin that mimics
Their form.
The scar is permanent. Remains in spite of new skin.
So be like stars. Real in sight of hounds. The margins float
Inside old stories told in nameless lies.
And dragons set sail amid the dust and smoke of industrial might.
The forceful germ.
The silent knife.
The not-so-subtle gun at night.
No. I'm sorry. Is that poetry? I close the book and lean my head against the filthy wall. I can't understand a word of it and this bus terminal smells like wet ground. And no one is clean. Everyone is angry about the mysteries that plague them. And the ceiling above is caved-in at the end of the waiting room, where a mass of boughs and limbs and roots hang down from the vegetation that has colonized the long-neglected roof. The light that comes from the unwilling sun above is lost, tangled in it too. And beneath this organic death clutch, the floor is covered in broken stones, shards of dried mud, disintegrating bits of tile, broken frames, and unwanted rubble everyone must navigate. Birds, trapped beneath the ceiling, flit desperate to find good water. Black as bats.
Moss grows in corners. Mold reaches up the walls toward empty windows. The doors here are broken forever. And there is safety in being unseen. No one looks at anyone else here.
I sit, having returned from the wars in the back alleys, the unforgiving streets, only a little man. Waiting for my bus. My clothes in a neat square bundle in my lap.
In the end my bus huffs slow and hard next to the platform. The wheels squealing for lack of oil. I clutch my square box of clothes and mingle with the others waiting to get on. We are planets hiding our scars. Trying to hide the wounds we've given to others. If we stay seated we will all be invisible. It's an old remedy.
The world will end in a bus station, a spiral galaxy waiting for the planets to board. Then a short ride to the port city I grew up in and still try to call my home, where they will grab me and feed me lies.
The world will end in a salvo of guns aimed at the advancing line of soldiers in static array. They say you are absolved of the sin of killing when it is done for flag and country. Soldiers know this is the first of all the great national lies. There are no names for days in the smoke. It's not a Friday or any day at all. Only the war. The sun is here and then it is not.
The world will end on a Saturday when you least expect it. It will end as my foot touches the third step up into the high bus. There. It ended a second ago. Did anyone notice? Everything that follows isn't real. I find a seat next to the window to watch what is left of us.
I float inside the crystal ball beside the snow, watching resin houses in pastel regalia go by. No one ever comes out of them. Plastic toys cannot be made to talk. I can still see his face as the blood ran out of his open stomach. My masterpiece, sanctioned for my sanity, it is said.
In the dark the blue machine begins to operate the rhythm of my heart until what blood I have is not my own. Like what a drum can do when you sit too close and it substitutes itself for the heartbeat. And your head hurts in places no massage can reach and if you're not careful you will find yourself sitting on a curb and hanging your head, watching children make a game of running headlong into moving trucks.
The dark hides nothing and means even less as you fly past it, safe behind the window of the bus. It seems to highlight blue steel with a light that has no source. Shines out of empty nothing. Reflects back to black. Comes from nowhere. Settles on the back of my empty hand. There is no future left. I will eat and sleep and I will walk as if in a red mist.
I keep listening for a note I can recognize as the water towers and piles of railroad ties drift by. Supplies staged for the next great assault. Coffins at the ready. It is not a tragedy. We love it this way. We built it this way. If we didn't like it this way, we would have changed it long before the age of exploration.