Current
Issue
Volume 12.1
Lucas Cardona
—
Thanksgiving, 2023
A chalky sky drapes Southport
in midday torpor. Battle clouds converge
over Cape Fear, ferrying the silky shadow
of God’s Doomsday Blimp across Yacht Basin
toward Battery Island. Gulls hover, dimensionless
as kites. Sailboats teeter in the harbor.
All the tourists have fled. I’m the only one left
at The Mullet Bar, slurping oysters off the half-shell,
crushing Landsharks like I’ll never go out of style.
This strip of highway, silt, and salt
marsh is where the world ends.
Another reason to celebrate, then.
I’m thirty-six today, belied like a butcher’s boy
in his father’s apron. My soft hands are clean
of blood, my life one long Indian summer
simmering inside this brainsauna.
I boast that life has made me hard,
that competition is cutthroat,
but I’ve never had my throat cut
or ever cut a throat. I paid my way on credit,
said yes to every offer,
played the trashtalking linecook, scowling
teenage drug dealer being hauled away
in handcuffs with his hood up.
I was that prodigal son addicted to theatrics.
They rushed me through the ER
bloodless, livid as a fish
and sticky with piss one night
in February sixteen years ago.
A dimetrodon in a nurse’s uniform
leaned over me. Clear, viscous
goo dripped off her mottled skin.
“Drink this,” she hissed,
handing me a Styrofoam cup
full of charcoal sludge. I puked
into a bedpan and crashed.
I woke in a tangled nest
of tubes, somewhat lucid, buoyant,
supple as a vowel in the mouth
of a toddler. My pajamaed mother,
looking haggard as a caged owl in the corner,
blinked at me and said, Don’t you ever
wonder what it’s like to feel normal?
Lucas Cardona is visiting assistant professor of English at McMurry University in Abilene, Texas. He holds an MFA in poetry from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where he taught in the Department of Creative Writing for three years. In 2024, he was a finalist for the Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize from Conduit Books & Ephemera. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, The Greensboro Review, New Ohio Review, Cimarron Review, wildness, and The Shore.
