Light

by Mike Bagwell

Moon Zhang

Don’t even think about colorless depths. All they want is to politicize the body. The year of the rat is so empty it walks back to its apartment spilling cheesesteak on the library’s copy of a Brautigan novel —  The Abortion — reads near half before realizing he is not moving toward a home but is a home and so damn unfinished a person could fall through the first floor into a womb. I wrote my friend in prison only once, visited him two, maybe three times. What if the first person is so empty it writes himself as an image of himself walking backward to his childhood, where roads mimic each other. The rat on vacation becomes overly enthusiastic about anything the color light blue. Suitable gifts: car accessories, art books, gym memberships, geological maps. What if it’s clouds doing the hard work and all I can do is adjust myself into the sky? I am approaching the body with what

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Mike Bagwell is a writer and software engineer based in Philly. He received an MFA from Sarah Lawrence and his work appears or is forthcoming in Halfway Down the Stairs, HAD, BULL, Bodega, SOFTBLOW, Whiskey Island, and others. Some editors have kindly nominated him for a Pushcart. He is the author of the chapbook A Collision of Soul in Midair (forthcoming from Bottlecap Press). He was the founding editor and designer of El Aleph Press and his work can be found at mikebagwell.me.