A Season in Hell with Rimbaud by Dustin Pearson

Author:Dustin Pearson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.

IV

Fossil Fuel

Moments after Hell’s ocean allows you to reach its surface,

the world turns over. You dart through the boiling waters

like a rocket straight into one of its geysers.

It gropes you. It coats you in waste as inside a bowel,

but once fully committed, it’s you who becomes

the movement. The journey is dark so your mind illuminates.

All those bodies floating at the top of the water and not one

of them moving. You tilt your head downward, but there’s

nothing to see, no chest, feet, and so you remind yourself

they’re still parts of your body, and the sky is red or pink

or maybe pink and red with no stars, and then everything flips,

as though the sky could fill, as if this part of Hell

were a cylinder filled with liquid filled with rocks and sand

and living ornaments some giant child could turn over

for amusement, and you fall or you float or you fall and float

headfirst into another world you can’t escape. You surface

in a place that looks like the world you left or one adjacent

where you can manage, where you did manage. Out of the geyser

you rise like a man pulled from quicksand. You clear the mud

from your eyes. The sun blinds but then you see. This world

is one of vast greens in sharp shapes attached to brown trunks

and vines. You wipe the mud from your limbs and when

you’ve cleared them, you wish you hadn’t because the flies

that attach to them bite, and where they bite the blood runs

and from where it runs mites burrow, and within the burrows

you’re compelled to scratch and where you scratch the burrows

widen and from the widening the blood pours and in the pour

the dead mites. You feel faint, but you realize you’ve walked a ways

from where you started. The loss is overwhelming, but ahead

of you, there are tracks. You want to fall but think not again,

and you think: no matter the man the tracks belong to,

you must find him.

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