Nightwalkers

by Liam Strong

It was a night empty of worms dredged from the rain, you said, pillage in the form of brass mugs, telephone stalks like shorn rye. Gill, the storm blares the way popular straight girls called us faggots in high school. The storm is right–apocrypha in our bloodstream, blood for burning, our little tempests in our palms. I wanted to write you a letter from a lifeguard’s tower when I wasn’t even a lifeguard and I wanted to place it under your sunblock while you were watching. The sun can singe us with or without cloud cover, Gill. It’s a publicized secret, it’s your living wish to die, it’s coded script lounging within your gums. You once called a winter night–unseasonably balmy–a stormy and dark night. I took your pillow from you, called it a slut, gave it back, and you weren’t one anymore. That accursed miracle, what power words give, what we don’t say. We sleep often, and without speech between us. If we sleep enough, we won’t ever have to speak up. I flew to Florida to visit your father after he fell from a forklift, because someone had to visit, because someone had to, because maybe he would have more to say to me. I write all the conversations he and I had before his last EKG onto freckles on your back, his back, both of your freckles. You guessed most of it correctly, which wasn’t surprising. We celebrated by committing arson on our whole town while everyone snored, and no one was sad because we all lived. There’s no such thing as a storm, Gill. Lovers do this thing in movies where they scream and dance in torrential downpour as a metaphor about not allowing anything to stop them. But everything can, and will. And if we didn’t dance, said nothing, remained dry the whole time? Is what breaks us down, tears at our shingles and glass, all our fault, Gill? It’s known meteorologically that, even if we can’t feel it, there’s always some small percentage of wind always moving on the planet. No one is out on this dilapidated boardwalk instructing us that we have to run or hide or face any such storm, honey. Because whether or not I believe the tension in the air is actually there, the water on my skinny arms actually water, thunder in reply to thunder, the problem still exists. Plain as day.

LIAM STRONG (they/them) is a queer neurodivergent straight edge punk writer who has earned their BA in writing from University of Wisconsin-Superior. They are the author of the chapbook Everyone’s Left the Hometown Show (Bottlecap Press, 2023). You can find their poetry and essays in Vagabond City and new words {press}, among several others. They are most likely gardening and listening to Bitter Truth somewhere in Northern Michigan. Find them on Instagram/Twitter: @beanbie666