Mondays

By Will Cordeiro

The DUI, the alimony settlement, the malpractice suit, the pills and vitamins, third night of dishes piled in the sink—this glut of life I haven’t learned a damn thing from, which deteriorates into the forms getting fed into a paper shredder, the ahhh one hums into a tongue depressor: nouns, verbs do not exist for what I feel, so I shrug or sigh or shumble once again into the pale kitchen’s refrigerator light to stare at rotting produce and the residue on condiment bottles, thinking about the rupturing infrastructure that has launched my distributed mind into orbit around some rough draft of an asteroid field, puffballs or pieces of space junk sending ping-backs from far-off satellites that glitch into starry obsolescence, this squishy sociological flowchart that I am, gormless amalgam of cark and merz, making myself into a search party for the stepping stones of logic I’ve followed to arrive here, as if the linoleum shine gave my kitchen island a sterilized afterglow like the un-place of a corporate waiting room, and I stand in my boxers itchy with half measures while my vaunted sense of interiority amounted, in their final calculations, to frippery and flapdoodle signifying less than a rubberbanded stack of comment cards, my brain’s larder of adolescent raptures or restless night sweats revealing little but the rigid patterns of my own patter perhaps, like smudges on putty, since (whenever I try to induce an involuntary memory) I’m underwhelmed with earnestness, as if aspirations were a troop of goop-smeared gear-laden frogmen headlamping through a swampy fog for a dead girl, no—for the lost essence of time, but nevertheless and erstwhile a little tinsel’s caught in a treetop’s delirium, ah-ha, yes, a spider’s chandelier, despite the metrics of smidgens and widgets, suchlike and so on with plenteous murkful accommodations, O my maundering daze keeps risibly speeding along, another leaf of a joke-a-day desk calendar tossed aside, a flesh flensed from a sordid, a diddlesome porkbarrel omnigatherum, though all along fur-clad lovers entangled at the happening, a yogi vibrated her yoni to an etherealized cosmic tuning fork, and a dirigible burned overhead.

Will Cordeiro has work in Agni, The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, DIAGRAM, Fourteen Hills, Nashville Review, [PANK], Sycamore Review, Territory, Terrain.org, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere.

Art by Joshua Cordeiro.