Issue 2, March 2009
Truth | previous next story |
Mission
Joe Bonomo
We designed and constructed these trees for optimum shade and deceit, you see. Light dappled on the back deck, tattooing dominion beneath my bare feet in a kind of strange, choked code, a cedar-splotched conceit. Through the haze, mid-day, mid-July—two boys playing in the next yard. They’re yelled at a lot. An invisible mom hangs sneakers to dry. A glimpse of hair. Desperate, frizzy song. The boys alternate between swinging on their father-made swingset and playing with guns, bright silver shard-hunks glinting in light, moving inside their tiny hands. The guns weigh their hands down. They pop with precision and laughter. Death is an unimagined sport. This is long before night, when odors in the house become death-tainted. Exhaustion, faint gun powder, darkened sleep. Adrift in beds they will roam silently, muscle-languaging the dusk back out of their bones (before that absurd harness stopped them from leaving the earth), vaulting smoke through houses, hills, communities. Guns lie in the moon-sorrowed backyard.
Joe Bonomo
We designed and constructed these trees for optimum shade and deceit, you see. Light dappled on the back deck, tattooing dominion beneath my bare feet in a kind of strange, choked code, a cedar-splotched conceit. Through the haze, mid-day, mid-July—two boys playing in the next yard. They’re yelled at a lot. An invisible mom hangs sneakers to dry. A glimpse of hair. Desperate, frizzy song. The boys alternate between swinging on their father-made swingset and playing with guns, bright silver shard-hunks glinting in light, moving inside their tiny hands. The guns weigh their hands down. They pop with precision and laughter. Death is an unimagined sport. This is long before night, when odors in the house become death-tainted. Exhaustion, faint gun powder, darkened sleep. Adrift in beds they will roam silently, muscle-languaging the dusk back out of their bones (before that absurd harness stopped them from leaving the earth), vaulting smoke through houses, hills, communities. Guns lie in the moon-sorrowed backyard.
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