Jennifer Maloney
Slanted
In slanted light, we hush into evening, outlined in simmered gold and a black as shiny and hard as glazed pottery. We whisper into October twilight, still just late afternoon, and the sun drips toward the horizon, an egg scraped into the trash. Shadows stretch the asphalt lot, escape into scrub wood at its bottom. A little wind stirs our hair like ashes as hands knuckle into pockets, collars grip chins and eyes fold beneath the oil-stained brims of our caps. We are work-filthy. We are more tired than alive, tired inside, tired enough that our brains stopped working long before our bodies could, but work is over now. We are heading home. West, toward a sun that leans against a shivering sky, unzips and drains its bladder into industrial dumpsters that gather in groves on that side of town, like tree stumps stunted with blight. Toward rented cots and one-bedroom apartments, perhaps a small house, stocked with soup and beans, rice and chewing tobacco, houses empty of all but ourselves, no partner or child to welcome us, no meal warming on a stove here, where the sun slinks through trash-stoppered ditches, ferrets out what shiny trinkets snag its itch-red eye—cellophane wrappers, dropped coins, bits of foil and string. Homeless sun, sleeps under a bridge, pulls a piss-stink blanket over its head. Hoots with joy at a lucky find: an unbroken bottle sloshed with a little brown booze, unnamed alcohol, just the thing to get the sun through a long, dark night. Drunken sun, wobbling, nearly falling on us as we creep into dust-silent rooms, heat-included coffins, the leaking-roofs-over-our-heads, thanking Whatever Must Be Thanked that at least we are not the mad, screaming sun, dancing like a suicide on the rim of the world, a shiv of foul light bleeding in one hand, threatening to slit our shadows’ throats—snip them off, as the Fates snip our lives—hallelujah, hallelujah, praised may It be, hallelujah, on your knees, give thanks.
