In a plot to sit at the adult table of a dinner party
the children of the room have turned a cardboard box into a transmogrifier.
From the kitchen, I can hear landlords discussing the average rent of this building.
A child crawls in the machine a third grader and out an astronaut.
I'm talking to a woman who is unknowingly a character in Springsteen's The River.
Once, her husband saved her from drowning, with an oar.
"The genus of Eretmochelys is derived from the Latin root eretmo, which translates to oar,"
proclaims a newly made marine biologist, climbing out of the box to join the party.
He walks over to the window. "And out there, well, there's a darkness," pointing at the river.
"There are pieces of things, like frogs, lining its banks, being transmogrified."
The half-drowned woman sets down her glass and begins dancing with the astronaut
who complains on her shoulder about his claustrophobia, slowly filling the building.
I'm seated on the couch with a Secretary of State. Between us a tension is building.
"I work on the Oregon Administrative Rules compilations, otherwise known as O.A.R."
"But maybe everything that dies someday comes back," sings the astronaut
to his dance partner. The two of them waltz through minglers like light at a party.
I'm looking a plutocrat in the eye. I'm wanting to throw his badge into the transmogrifier
and have it leap out a fresh water shark. Have it and the marine biologist waltz into the river.
I imagine that woman's husband, somewhere, waist deep in a river,
ushering mutated things to the shores of some bait shop's building.
"Have you seen the original blueprints of a transmogrifier?"
the Secretary says, stirring a drink with the lost husband's oar.
The rest of the room stands blurred and frozen, looking for something. It's now a search party.
And that short helmeted dancer crying about his botched test flights, the most grounded astronaut
I've ever seen, yells, "My name on the Space Mirror! The only honor of an astronaut.
A group of letters, spelled out by explosions, stuck on a solid black river
on the grounds of the John F. Kennedy Space Center!" He's collapsed in the arms of an awkward party,
his visor fogged with scotch and delusion, like all the haunted windows of this building.
"I'm thinking of transferring to NOAA's office for Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, O.A.R.,"
says a teenager, dreaming of meteorology, one foot in the transmogrifier.
The woman carries her manic spaceman over to the transmogrifier
and offers him to it like the first monkey-turned-astronaut
sacrificing all its bananas to the experimental whims of Houston. She pulls out an oar,
hands it to one of the landlords, and stumbles downstairs, throwing herself in the river.
I can feel the property value drop out of the building.
We are all suddenly attending a rescue party.
And out here, well, there's a party. Another darkness crawls into a transmogrifier
and falls out a job. I'm building a monument of Tecate bottles to an adolescent astronaut.
Down by the river, the wind is being baptized, as continuously as oars.
Jak Cardini is a poet. Duh. A founding member of the Austin, Texas based collective The Gold County Paper Mill, he currently is working on his BFA in creative writing in Louisville, Kentucky.
His most recent project is the forthcoming lit. zine Catch Up: Louisville.
He has been previously published in Word Riot, Retort Magazine, Zygote In My Coffee, Dicey Brown and others.
For some reason he thinks this bio should've been funnier. Right now, he is drinking a Shiner Bock.
Archived at http://girlswithinsurance.com/index.php/poetry/42-poetry/193-jc-0410-water and shortlinked at http://frsh.in/a8
