What Peace Means to Us--Final Sneak Peek
- Izaak David Diggs
- Apr 30, 2020
- 2 min read
Saw a woman riding a skateboard and carrying a baby. She may have been twenty or she may have been thirty, with people on the street it’s hard to tell.
The skateboarder didn’t look worried, her face was blank and hard: That baby may as well have been a bag of Taco Bell. I watched them pass an old Asian man sweeping leaves. Sensing movement, looking at the bush next to me and seeing a caterpillar. Glanced up and the skateboarder with the baby was gone.
I thought about that skateboarder all day at work: Was it her baby? Had she stolen it? How did she see it as okay to ride a board carrying a baby? Those questions as I assembled plastic fans and took plastic off chairs. It’s summer now and where I work smells like false cold. My life has become a series of pantomimes--one moment I am setting up workstations and the next I’m heading home. One second I am looking at the Playing Catch calendar as coffee brews and the next and I am staring at it while grabbing an after work beer.
I can feel the scar across my belly, the heat makes it stretch.
The caterpillar is still reigning over the leaves next to the bus stop.
The way it moves its legs it looks like waving.
One moment I have the taste of my morning coffee in my mouth and the next some candy someone brought into work. A moment of rage comes from around a corner and moves my arm in arc, sweeping the last school calendar off the fridge. A pissed off hand crushes it, drops it in the trash.
Walking upstairs in the dark, daring witches to come out of the shadows.
And then I’m sitting on Sleepy McStains trying to smell my son through the past. Somedays I feel so lost even Grandma can’t find me.
Troubled man, drifting through the days, longing for ghosts.
From What Peace Means to Us to be released May 12, 2020
(C) 2020 Izaak David Diggs
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