If Only for Today The shit I saw pulling that shopping cart around when they came out of nowhere, pushed it over and threw all of my trash around: when they knocked me down, my face hit the curb and my body hit the ground. When the time came for me to get up, the metallic taste of blood and the cannibalistic taste for blood were in my mouth and on my mind, disrespectively. I was too tired to think when I pulled the teeth from my tongue and wondered when the rain would come to wash away the song I sang that spilled straight down my face. I thought if I could smell anything I might cry myself back to the kindergarten classroom where I forgot how to read, and eyes, like my mouth, began to bleed there under the orange salty light on the Brooklyn Bridge at night. But there was no relief from the stickiness splashed over me or the rocks that I'd eaten that were paining my jaw as the cars drove by, while my yellow raincoat hid a rash that was driving me crazy when I was already insane, seeing those imaginary cars crash all the time in my brain with Lady Liberty's disdain looking on. Was there something wrong with me the day I applied for the janitor job, to push a mop across an already wet floor, fucked up from that flask in my pocket? They didn't hire me, but I've had that flask in my pocket since the locks changed on the flop house after it burned down and I tried to stay in the ashes. After that the only thing that I had was a shopping cart full of shit that I dragged around like a farmer's broken wheelbarrow on parade through the borough trying to trade trash for treasure. At first I didn't feel it, but if the dented flask was glass, (and it had been before) the shards might have tried to stab my ass and scratch me, driving the infection on my shirt deeper beneath my skin. Thankfully, I only had a sore spot on my chest where my ribs were bruised on the corner. At the end of the bridge I saw Donny and George sippin' a forty, standing on the corner wanting to know what happened, cause all my shit blew away. But we all knew there was nothing to do now that could change the fact that all my shit blew away whether it was as smoke or over the bridge and into the water below. That beer tasted awful and I could hardly sip it without letting it dribble down my dirty shirt, down to the docks on the row where we could start a fire in the trash can cause it was cold outside at night and down by the water Ben's got a bent coke can with holes poked in the side. And he's doing the electric slide with his bag of powder sprinkled on the aluminum foil; for what it's worth a burnt spoon's in the dirt and he's got a white rash bubbling up across his skin and none of us have had a hot shower in at least ten years. But that beer keeps us from crying a genuine tear and that trash can is warmer than the cold foggy air up there where all my shit blew away and that ledge above the mud means I might have somewhere to stay, stuck in the rain, if only for today when the rain ain't even falling on me. Bio: Kevin Abate is an autistic writer from Texas who's struggled with mutism his entire life.
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