Letter From The IKEA In Red Hook, Brooklyn
I was
imagining the future
I can never have
wandering ghostlike through
other people’s homes. An accumulation
of lives hypothetical—cardboard televisions
and rows of fake books,
beautiful lilywhite strangers
staring back from RIBBA frames,
invented families conjured from scratch
and leading effortlessly into other rooms,
other families, other apartments, other realms,
like switching the television channel.
Follow the arrows.
Pathways like arteries
toward some great organ
like intestines arranged
flowing to some end
its conscious unknown,
yet working toward
the goal of keeping one alive.
—
I want people to hear my body scream
vibrating across these plasterboard walls:
tucked head-to-toe on a KLIPPAN couch,
below a LERHAMN stained antique,
curled up on a matte-black MALM
hugging my knees close to my chest
while young couples shuffle past
Sofas and Textiles and Wardrobe And Café
as my cat paws at an empty food bowl
and then at my face.
Fuck it, I’ll buy matching sheets in my favorite pastels,
feel the combed-cotton bath towels,
run my fingers on the low-pile rugs,
touch the fuzzy leaves of artificial plants. Ingenious solutions
and flatware storage and organizational designs
for lighting fixtures and smarter men than I have engineered
my kingdom where I hide like a stomping ghost
haunting my fourth-floor walkup driving my neighbors insane
with hammers and nails and slamming doors and 11pm calls
to the motherland. They will tell this to my landlord. I’ll perish into the walls,
I will dissolve in next year’s heat. I’ll smile at the employees
from behind my French Blue face mask. Please, keep your distance,
I’ve been doing it for years. If we now demand a faux sincerity
then listen, friend, I can provide that in spades.
Lament for the Yuba County 5
On Feb. 24, 1978, five mentally disabled men from 40 miles north of Sacramento vanished into the night on their way home from a Chico State basketball game. More than 100 days passed before the snow melted and search parties found four of the boys’ bodies in rugged Plumas National Forest. At least one had survived for weeks in a remote forest service trailer nearly 20 miles from his group’s car. Body parts of the others were found nearby.
you
roll the windows down
emerge from steel cocoons
leave mercury behind
you
in disdainful terrain
seeking polaris
but they all point north
you
in heartache throes
watching for flashlights
may death arrive via trolley
you
thirteen weeks later:
your steel wool beard
your neglected cornucopias
your skull
below your spine
300 feet away
wind howling absent cartilage
you
without shoes
wandering bare ground
in perpetuity
Blake Z. Rong is a writer and journalist in Brooklyn, New York. He recently received an MFA in Writing & Publishing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. As an editor in the automotive industry, his longform journalism has been previously published in Autoweek Magazine, Jalopnik, and Road & Track. He hails from central Massachusetts and is currently working on a collection of stories