m i c h a e l    k i m b a l l

[Translated Messages for Future Viewing]
 

I rub my scratchy eyes to dark sleep, which promotes her beautiful face, so we both get younger or older. When I hear our hidden neighbors after the front doors open the alarm clock, the invisible vibrations wake me up through our common wall. For the forever time, does this song play too loud before including all the future content? The alarm clock ghosts hurry up and attempt the bedside movements before we have a locked concrete door.


She hides herself a little behind her ears, but her bouncy hair looks at me through her rubber-band ponytail. Walk me to the kitchen cabinets for the simple operation and watch the smoking cup that has lived with us for so many years. She comes down from her chin to her chest, but some of us are too quick to drink cold water. Are you a little nervous if you have to raise your open arms or do you hide your surprise mouth behind your palm hand? When I catch up to her, her critical blanket inclines toward an institutionalized skin. We begin to feel warm again and we leave each other's hair blankets.


I can hear what you think: the fall elderly end easily if you please. I work on the old clock, but I go there expecting her to leave me before this lost time pivots at too late. I see her protected light, but she doesn't know my fun-time example from yesterday, but I hope she still laughs for me. She lies back without falling out of her undone clothes, but my short shirt believes me. Blink and then put one good foot on one good leg for a shoe buckle and go. Why was the downtown breakfast a pair of sporting shoes or anything I have to chew?


We carry on with some food cartons, but our lovable weapons aren't enough, but I don't know how much we can tolerate us, but I'm wearing the same funny outfit from before we last saw the bright sun. Her burning skin U-turns almost transparent at nighttime, but it's not enough together time to wrap her up in my tired arms. Small steps, they say, and we go hard all the long night. Did the firefighters block the vital intersection or hold up the rowing house on fire? Waterfalls scale down the building's front windows building and the vested door opens the inner door under the front stairs. Maybe none of this exists, so we direct a full reversal in the opposite direction where there's so much structural damage, but the following street opened itself up future wide. I can feel the warm sun on your exposed back, but I can't get even from any known direction.


The following houses built on the swamp paper almost feel green level with the early earth floor. Her bright eyes make her sudden appearance shiny, and she tilts her falling head to the side, but I don't panic if I think you saw. Please choose from other people, even though I have a clean memory of your last face. Can I use your real name or will you make a new one or will nobody ever know? Do you want to be yourself or somebody else or nobody else or do you not want to be reborn? If I only use some found data, are you still full of all the lost people? One day, I hope you say something about my real life as a made-up character in a lost television program every week. I should record some of these translated messages for future viewing, but on what past device? A unit of breaking light opens the fractured window and the folded curtains are drawn back in seven layers. Is that flashing light too high or is the imaginary airplane too small?

 

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MICHAEL KIMBALL is the author of eight books, including Big Ray, Dear Everybody, Us, and, most recently, The One-Hour MFA (in fiction). His work has been translated into a dozen languages, and featured on NPR’s All Things Considered and in Vice, as well as in The Guardian and Bomb.


in issue eleven


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