June On The West Coast

To Mikey, it feels like a different world. It feels like America without the bones, like this was the carcass spat up.New Jersey tries to kill you with miserable, bluefingered cold. Everything about dying in New Jersey is surgical and numb: you flail helplessly, through high school and maybe college before drowning in your parent’s basement or in someone’s attic apartment, watching smokestacks gag and choke, thinking, is this really the place Bruce Springsteen sang about? And then watching the neighborhood kid you grew up playing street hockey with get wheeled out on a stretcher– it’s sad, your Ma will say the next morning. Overdose, third one on the street this winter. Going down to the basement– Christ it’s freezing– and talking to your sweaty, anemic brother who feels both in need of salvation and like God to everyone but himself. He ashes out on an old painting and hums when he hears about the dead kid and then says, like a picture-perfect slash-film actor, who will survive and what will be left of them?