Astounded by Jasmine Ledesma

​  Randy Heinitz CC



Astounded

   Now I live on Cherry Court, a little trailer park the size of someone's backyard. I've put up cheeky gnomes and a mud mat out in front. My windows let everything in. 
   I was in bad shape before. 
   Twenty two and manning a trench in the Jungle of America’s Desire. It was bottomland. Rations were rationed and everything could have been prevented but was not ever prevented. I inhaled bedrock and exhaled fumes. I was nobody's son. The world was a tailspin, a car seizing off track. Fantastic, awful oranges and delayed greens stretched on over the landscape as new bombs went off on the horizon like a fresh idea in the mind of God. We were sky watching, chain smoking, bullet flashing rubies. I, the dud of them all. 
   I was disagreeable and all I wanted to do was read the latest of the Times in the shade of the bended trees or ride Johnny’s back like a kiddie. I held my gun at a pathetic angle. 
   But then I split into fluorescence. An unhinged pearl, I would speak out loud to myself. Full recital poems. I heard Ella's orchestra at night where there was only smoke and snores and distant cat mews. I screamed when asked to speak. I hid in bushes pretending I was a rabbit without intention only furs. I knew nothing of the balking afternoon in those moments. My aim was all at once fantastic. I could have shot God out of his heaven. 
   After four weeks of this, Johnny found me in a tree, naked and  convinced he was a replica. He could have been anyone. I didn't see him. I saw starbursts and the insides of fruits. He took me to the infirmary where a cloaked nurse declared me insane. I was booted off to America's bay the following week. But not before Johnny kissed my forehead as though touch were a cure. 
   You little soiled undergarment, he said. 
   And then nothing more. That was three years ago. I still spin into that fever light sometimes but nothing is as potent as it once was. This is what I tell the doctors who like to poke at me with glass instruments and feed me sedatives by the dozen. I get by on Government checks. Government checks have afforded me this room. Government checks have afforded me these words. 
   I still think of Johnny as I fall to sleep. He lives in my eyelids. My kaleidoscope man in green. I wonder what has become of him. Did he get out? Or perhaps he went with the sudden prompt of an enemy’s surprise truckload. Out like a rose plucked from a garden of posies.
   Just like that.

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Jasmine Ledesma is a writer based in New York. Her work has appeared in or is set to appear in places such as Crazyhorse, Rattle, and [PANK] among others. Her work has been nominated for Best of The Net and twice for the Pushcart Prize. She was named a Brooklyn Poets fellow in 2021. Her novella Shrine was listed as a finalist for the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize. Her poem was highly commended by Warsan Shire for the Moth Poetry Prize.

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