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Concrete (PDF)

 

I’m trying out a new recipe: concrete in everything. Hands, leaden. Eyes strong enough to push or pull the seam of the horizon, depending on how I stand. Now I stand with legs spread, knees bent, hefting bags of quick mix onto the counter. I overfill a saucepan the size of my head, coughing as it dusts the sink. There’s powder everywhere. It plumes as they tell me I’m killing myself. I tell them to go to hell. Slap clouds from my thighs and swirl the mix into milk, drinking it by the gallon. Its consistency is not unlike paint or paste. My hair grows inches a day now. My shoulders are miles wide. My teeth can break everything but themselves, though they’re nonetheless broken. Nothing can fix them. Not even concrete. I lash a pile of it with olive oil and clap its tumescence into bricks, lifting them into stacks. I’ll be damned, I shout into the hallway, if I’ll let anyone in here. And by the time they dare to enter, they’re faced with a wall. It’s me. I am the wall. I am what I eat. I am concrete. I fall like a piano and crack like lightning. I skin knees and chew up childhoods. I wheel bags of me over the windowsill, hoping to divot the hoods of cars, to crater sidewalks, smash windows back to sand. But still the guts are hollow, the bones spurred, the world too slow, immobile. Still I hobble to the stairs and collapse, cascading down its steps, the naysayers telling me they told me so, the slab of me first rocks, then gravel, now grit. Let them cry over my dust. Let their leak pill me back to bricks. I am what I eat, I scream. I am concrete.