another country

big moon hook in my eye to the east,
king salmon sky like the sun is rising

in the elbow of the onramp, my brain drifts out of place, and i mistake my car for a stranger’s, 2021 for 2017, downtown for downtown, oakland for LA. crossing into san ramón, jay said, well, we’re just in orange county now, and for a moment i believed it, recognition spinning out across six lanes, hands grasping at nine and three for where i’d gone wrong. this happens if i don’t pay attention, like how judith haimes had to float belly-down on top of her own life for years because to dive to the bottom meant her head would be rocketed with pain. cracks in her skull sprouting shimmering, knifelike leaves. so she couldn’t be a psychic anymore, so she couldn’t see her son die in a car crash before it happened, so she sued the doctors who laughed at her when she said she had an allergy to iodine-based dyes. don’t even know if they did the MRI. just hearing it makes me scared to concentrate, the way i hold my breath in movie scenes of swimming. is that empathy? i read an essay that tells me the autistic brain processes pieces before the whole, sometimes instead. i have no use for bouquets when everything is a flower. one time i rode a train from kyoto to osaka and saw a costco in the middle of nowhere, a saucer of american ceramic crash-landed in the grass. a costco! nothing else remains of that afternoon. the mind is another country where the sun rises and sets at the same time. last week’s walk to the store got wrecked in the wash, and now all that remains is the sound of a man screaming at me from across the crosswalk. for the first time, i felt the full circumference of the word faggot: a red hoop full of torn lottery tickets and spent confetti and scraps of lovers’ white shirts and leather. but most of all air: his voice ragged and lonely, last bird alone on an island with a broken wing. there is a vast grotto that looms behind all concatenations of fragments and for a moment i was inside it. then i was out, brain back to stick shift, do not look walk three more blocks read script check phone walk home. time is not a wheel. in my mind, i turn it on its side, and it is a spiral. another country between the seasons. more life stuffed like petals between the days.

Adrian Matias Bell is a writer and musician living on unceded Musqueam territory. His work has previously appeared in Winter Tangerine and Qwerty and is forthcoming in Qu. Originally from California, he is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. He also makes music as Nightjars.