Walls a celestial blue, and two windows, whose thin
metal louvers my mother painted red and white—
under the second set of panes, the alabaster
radiator cover--scrimshaw of wrought iron crosses
next to the trundle bed, where the ghost of my cousin (17, hit
by the Metro North 9:17 local) sleeps, and peeking out
from under his mattress the top of a Playboy cover.
At the head of the bed, a wind-up cherry red clock, stuck
at 11:33, when my mother let me know my father died,
falling down our flight of stairs. Beside time’s arthritic hands,
an amber bottle of Valium, prescribed to help me sleep
through the asthma that clenched my lungs. In the second
window, an almond AC. Below it, a carpet whose pile fused
a sprinkle of violets, blues, and pale oranges, where I’d bed
down, breathing what the AC exhaled, and wait for the drugs
to welcome me away. To the right, a long desk cobbled
from two old doors, veneered in mahogany and supported
by three sets of drawers each painted marigold. Above it,
a length of fishing line, strung from one ceiling corner
to another. The model airplanes I built from strips
of beige balsa and covered with Japanese tissue—
their yellow wings and olive fuselages dangle from paperclips,
turning, diving, striving, in the gusts from the AC, but never
climbing out of that room’s severe gravity.
James Wyshynski is a former editor of the Black Warrior Review. His poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Cincinnati Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Nimrod, River Styx, Stoneboat, South Florida Poetry Review, Terminus, The Cortland Review, The Connecticut Review, Vallum, and are forthcoming in the Northern New England Review, Nimrod, and others. His book, Emigrant from an Imagined Country, is slated to be released in 2026.