In This Strange Light
by Jarrett Moseley
I google “HEAVEN?” and learn
about the shimmering room
where souls are pieced together
before they’re shot down
through the sky above us
and into us.
The night I met Bea,
smoking a cigarette
outside of Sharon Pres, she said
when you recognize
someone you’ve never met
it means you were assembled
in the same room, from
the same light. I laughed
as she turned away
but then, I began to see it—
each person’s individual
brightness. In the coffee shop,
a man bends to feed
pound cake to a small black dog
and at the edge of his fingers, a bright red shine;
the barista’s hair falling from her cap,
bioluminescent; a soccer mom’s leg
glows green
as her daughter hugs her shin
and the light bleeds
into the little girl’s chest. When
a soul bleeds, it needs
someone to catch the leak.
A week before I met Bea,
at the same church, too drunk to stand
I vomited Purell
on the sidewalk at Mason’s feet.
The warmth of his hand
shimmered across my back
as he drove me home
and gaping in the center
of my slumped chest
was a dark purple wound. The souls
have their own lives.
Sometimes we feel them
push their shovels into
the dirt of our bodies
more deeply than other times.
Like the mountain trip
to a waterfall where I saw
Drew’s dragon tattoo for the first time
or, when I look at the picture I took
of Mason on the hike back to the car.
At the edge of the photo,
sunlight shoots through the over-brush
above him, straight at the camera lens
and cuts a black hole
where his face would be
so all you can see
of his small body
is a red shirt climbing
the 60-degree angle of the trail
like a cardinal taking off
into the sun.
Some darknesses
illuminate
like light never could.
Puddle of piss
on a hospital bed, body laid
in muddy snow, a black sunflower
glimmering on the side of the road
during the drive home—
I was too fucked-up to know
if the color was real
without anyone there to say.
The souls don’t care. They only
carry us from one sharp tack
to the next, one cliché sun
to the deadness of 11:30 PM. What brightness
claps a door shut in me? What
tender skin sharpens
the thing trapped inside of it?
The last time I saw Bea
was the night she screamed
and shattered Mason’s computer
with a fidget spinner—
exactly 354 days before he died
in that same apartment, a needle pendulum
swinging from his vein,
brightness gone.
We drove her up and down Independence
for hours searching for the psych ward.
I pulled her, elbow first,
out of the Waffle House
after she shouted
in the waitress’s face, and placed
a Newport between the split knives
of her fingers. Face emotionless
with tears, she mumbled
“I thought she was going
to attack me.” The shovel
hit a rock inside my chest. We took her
to a bright room. They took
her shoelaces, her name
to keep her.
To keep her from bleeding.