MONO ISSUE 1 PDF FLIPBOOK - Flipbook - Page 23
GODS
by Adam Tamashasky
My students doubt me—or don’t care—so I tell them again:
we are about the work of gods.
Behold:
I write Sally, an honest name, on the board,
far to the left so her journey can be long.
They fill in the rest, we pick up speed:
Sally’s from Chicago, she likes to record books for the blind
(a professor once said she did well with a passage of Milton,
and poor Sally, bankrupt of praise, clung to this dime's-worth),
and on and on until...
Sally, on a rainy night in Chicago—that city where girls find out that something if not all of
what they were somewhere else doesn’t matter—couldn’t find her keys, couldn’t even find the
pocket on her raincoat where she kept the keys, and so was flustered and shaken as she
stumbled through the rush hour crowd next to the El tracks, flustered and shaken right up to
the moment when the man with hard hands—those hands against her lower back, pushing
into her sinuous curve beneath her silk blouse beneath her raincoat, those hands that would
be her last conscious physical sensation—shoved her into the 8:20 Red Line to Howard.
That’s what we do to Sally, the lot of us.
Gods, I say, gloating.
23
