Issue #85

Angst, My Death, and Inside My Head It's Snowing

by Tom Whalen

Angst

A stranger is asleep in my thought dreaming in German. We are on a train to Aalen, though I know no one there, and he is asleep within me. Also, I do not know German, have never studied it, have no idea why I'm in Deutschland. Ich spreche kein Deutsch, kein Deutsch spreche ich.

Is the man asleep within me my antecedent or I his?

Suddenly, the thought within my thought that he might awaken...

***

My Death

While nurses drank coffee the color of the hair of my dead mother, a locomotive labored up the steep grade of my cervical toward the mountains of my brain. I would have wiped the window, but it wasn't a window, it was a door to the abyss of heaven. At the foot of my bed glowed a coal furnace as if from the end of time. Tripartite rain—petals, flames, acanthi—seared the windowpane. In my open palm a funnel formed as dark as a forest. Then, as in a dream, I was floating above the hospital terrace and looking down at myself watching rhinoceros thunder past on the streets below. For a moment I thought I really was dreaming and back home in Bologna, but I had never lived in Bologna and I wasn't dreaming.

***

Inside My Head It's Snowing

Inside my head it's snowing.

But how can you tell?

Because my head is cold.

But what does that mean?

That it is snowing on the freeways, that cars are sliding all over the place, pile-ups everywhere, damage to glass and limb, metal crumpled like paper, my thoughts can't see where they're going, the snow thick, the lights penetrate nothing, drivers and children despair, thoughts seize up, freeze, mothers give birth to monstrosities that die in the backseats of dreams.

But what does that mean?

I see a sign in the distance.

What does it say?

I can't make it out, the sleet on the glass, the crossings and hatchings in the window, the blood-smeared mirror in the snow like a convulsion of wind, and the moon breaks through the clouds.

But what does it say?

You are entering another country.