Jimmy places his hands shoulder-width apart, on the sands of a shore, and Jimmy, he hears in his palms the faint scuttle of a heartbeat, his mother’s. Jimmy feels the lake like a womb, Jimmy travels the river as it goes, the veins of her making him. Jimmy wants to be birthed. Jimmy wants to live. Jimmy, he stands neck deep in the lake and cannot bend his knees, lift his legs. Jimmy he has no willpower. And the river, when it takes him, because it will take him he thinks at some point or another, when he is not looking but instead sleeping in his bed, sheets wrapped around his body, shroud wound, that river will be the warmth he is everyday seeking.
Up and over a hill, where there are hills, this town mostly flat and flat-lining, Jimmy he watches what would be birds come and go over the edges. There are no birds. There is only Jimmy seeing the black spots on his eyes from too much staring at the sun. Birds with letters in their mouths, dropping them one by one to Jimmy’s shoulders, making paragraphs on his back, spelling out his weighted existence. Jimmy thinks they are brushing their wings on him because they don’t have arms to hug and this is the closest thing for a bird, with wings like this. But Jimmy, he doesn’t know that they are writing him out, sentence to sentence, linking his body to a sermon, lecturing his heart in stillness and words. Jimmy, sitting watching, sometimes up at the sun too, with more birds over the hill, all the phrases scrambling to touch him.
