April 2, 2023 - Michael Leifer’s “Heat Lightning”

“It’s just so beautiful.”

Even though I was alone, I had to say these words aloud, watching heat lightning illuminate patches of the evening sky, segments flashing between visibility and darkness like angels in heaven snapping polaroids above the cloudline. I felt the distinctive slack-jawed, slouching feeling of awe; a yielding sensation like a house caving in: strawberries falling apart in sugar or the first time a girl holds your hand after high school, you’re dizzy and the world spirals away in ashes of life.

“It’s just so beautiful,” I thought, watching the white streaks of antimatter paint landscapes on the sky’s black canvas.

My thoughts normally roll like currents, sometimes clear and brilliant as polished steel, other times fused together like deformed twins or a radio stuck between stations and picking up chatter.

Severity and mercy, smoke upon flame, Eden and the primordial moment of transgression, a primal time at the center of my existence, what holds and spins in my direction; pagan blessings through brown lips and the taste of iron; buffalo liver in the mouth of an Osage Indian – droplets of the blood mixing with the Mississippi, red fading into brown, carried in muddy swells, snaking along the cape.

Buzzing flies and the stench of death; a field of slain buffalo, hideless and rotting in the sun with their tongues cut out. The New Madrid fault line and the winter of 1812, the ground gaping open with spires of sulfur. The Mississippi river flows backwards, inverted like a Satanic cross. Swallowed by the earth, the victims leave no trace and funerals are held over empty caskets.

These summer nights in Cape Girardeau are like walking through hot soup, but the air outside is sweet, smelling of humidity and flowers it reminds me of a girlfriend’s naked skin, bathed in the soft light of the room I kept in my parents’ old house, since destroyed; her warmth, her scent and the face that reminds me. The way touching her arm felt like the most erotic thing in the world, the way a flowery aroma is carried by a humid Missouri night.

“My body is a house I place inside the storm,” I whisper to myself with my eyes closed. If I say it enough times, I’ll stop being afraid. If I keep saying it, I will be able to do anything. I repeat it like handholds in stone and I’m climbing the face of something jagged but my body remains in bed.

Culture’s fruits on the tree of life and annihilation hangs from wisdom. Oh hear them devils, these thoughts with eyes, these words with wings, these locusts that cross the ocean. These thoughts that roll like thunder, these scathed bits of memory, how a man can burn so calm and bright, my love strikes like sickness. Dreams ring like music in the black sun of a memory entombed and forgotten. I hear nothing. I hear nothing, for now is the summer of sleeping. Days are spent unseen, unheard, broken, narcotized and fading. July burns outside my window, but inside me is winter, alive and beating. For now is the summer of sleeping. Now is the summer of sleeping.

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Michael Leifer graduated Fordham University in 2022 with a degree in journalism. His first assignment as a professional journalist was in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.