Industrial Resonance by Ember Jones
I sit in the back stairwell
and breathe in the little spaces
between
each letter.
A quiet, submissive moment spent
hunkered in the dim. Outside, I listen to
a chorus of cicada, a familiar hum
burrowed just underneath
all that awkward stillness. Inside, strange
yellow fluorescent lights are
pulsing
to mollify the rhythm
of the cicada.
Somewhere in the distance, an elevator
beeps and whirs softly, dutifully making
a slow lurching
stop at each
floor, grudgingly filling her belly with
the knobby elbows and knees and
gangly fingers of
hungry dreamers and vomiting
them back out again at the
bottom floor. I feel her tendons
aching as she rises again
through the dull, hollow shaft, humming
quietly to herself in the gloom
to mollify
the dark.
Time doesn’t pass like it usually
does, buried here, just underneath
the strange yellow corner
of the stairwell. I let myself grow a
little older. I am thousands of bodies
lonelier in a swarm of cicadas, each humming
its own rhythm,
demanding
I listen. I am
lurching slowly through
every emotion groaning deep
and low in my stomach, every little
breath drawn achingly
between the spaces of each
tiny letter.
I find myself humming
to the sound of the
cicadas and the elevator, careful
not to draw attention to
the body in the corner of the strange
yellow stairwell, hunkered
quietly
in the dim.