Today I Found Myself
• And by myself, I mean, of course,
• My cell phone.
• Today I found myself
• Struggling to open a can of bread
• Rendered boneless by ambulance sirens.
• Today I found myself bobbing for durians
• While balancing on the back of my head
• The groans of a dozen dying men.
• Then looking in the fridge for food.
• Then looking in the food I’d found for more fridge.
• Then mapping it all out in my mind on the kitchen wall.
• Then plotting the downfall of sorrow.
• Today I didn’t find myself
• Foraging for porridge. I
• Haven’t done that for a while. I
• Have some porridge to keep me going.
• You find it in the darndest places and you stash it away.
• Nor have I been training sea urchins for the US Navy.
• They’re too slow.
• I have not been proofreading.
• I did not have sexual relations with that woman Miss Lewinsky.
• But I did inhale. Multiple times.
• Today I have not been floating under the basement,
• Nor swimming in sandhills,
• Nor looming up at the pavement.
• Today I have been neither cloud nor lightning storm.
• Today I found myself
• Looming from loam like a lion,
• Fending off a fine friendly feline,
• Freediving into hypothe-seas,
• Channeling the most ordinary trees,
• And, vaguely, from certain angles,
• Resembling, as you do,
• The dance of moonlight on water from the entrails of the jungle.
Dedicated to my former boss for asking me to use more bullet points.
Nathan D. Horowitz was conceived in Florence, or possibly Marseille, and raised in Ann Arbor. He worked in Ecuador for four years, Austria for fifteen, and Kansas for three before migrating to Baltimore with his wife and teen. He has three cats, a BA in English, and an MA in Applied Linguistics. When not writing or translating, he can often be found teaching high school English.
He’s convinced of his lack of opinions. He talks like a macaw appreciating a shiny button. He has ramrod-straight posture when he slouches. He believes that if armadillos had long, fast, sticky tongues like chameleons, they would use them to catch and eat birds. His goal is to produce ocarinas for centipedes. He can transform his thoughts into incense smoke. His first four hundred books were printed on wind.
Click here for his beautiful piece ‘A’ as published in our 4th issue!
+ Here for the entire chapbook ‘Velocirapture’ on Bandcamp!