Untitled (Imagine) by Paul-Victor Winters
Imagine being lost at sea, only it’s not a sea and you aren’t lost, just sort of sad. It’s a small town with a hardware store and an empanada shop. You’re either fourteen or fifty-four, but it doesn’t matter. The litter in the street gutter is much the same. Something’s askew in the cosmos. Hint of rain in the air. Misaligned heavenly bodies. Imagine the sum of your melancholia automatically deducted from your paycheck. You see, Monday is a perpetual afternoon. February turns into autumn. 1994 becomes 2018 and then it’s St. Patrick’s Day all over again. And the good cholesterol is taking the bad cholesterol out for drinks. But it’s only Thursday and loan payments drop water balloons from hotel windows, next to a hardware store, next to St. Cloud’s Motel, where alcoholic grandfathers go to die. Something’s askew. And Friday waits at the pizza shop counter with bad news in his linty pocket.
Paul-Victor Winters is a writer and teacher in southern New Jersey whose
poems can be found in numerous journals.