JOHN DEMING

John Deming grew up in New Hampshire but currently lives in
New York City. He is Managing Editor of Coldfront Magazine.

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Atmosphere

 I see myself face down, sucking
 air, blistered cold and nearly dead—
 is it the surface of Triton, its thin
 loaf of an atmosphere?—and wake
 to the deep of a gracious, warm
 ocean: from the top down, humans
 filling the pits and grooves, each
 formed with an odd face. Crawling
 so deep, it’s not what’s forgotten
 that’s surprising, but what’s remembered:
 jetlagged, will I remember this dark
 British bar where a small group
 has formed to watch an American
 football game? Most three-hour
 lumps are flickering or forgotten;
 when humans are gone, so too
 will be anything we remembered—
 minus the spotted sense that
 to remain once is to remain always.
 The globe is on television. A bank
 commercial, but a planet’s still
 a pretty thing. The blue-sweatered
 bartender is playing various
 Rolling Stones tunes. Funny
 that earth can be televised
 while standing as the only place
 with television—the image flattened,
 buried deep in our atmosphere, ebbed
 into tubes and boxes. The planet  
 outside bobbing unmoved in bizarre
 silence. Surrounded interminably
 by night sky, always silent and
 seductive—a satin gown, the better
 parts of the body just out of sight.
 Atmosphere positing itself,
 a thin film of cloud, debris, bird
 (it will all dry up in one of several
 possible ways); of  nitrogen,  
 oxygen, argon. . . .sweet
 exhaustible heavens!—if anyone
 knew we were here, they might
 be impressed—and history dismissed,
 we might be proud, as of a patio.
 Inhabiting the thing: magnet
 for an undulant, breathy shell of air—






The quick

 left with the fact I’m talking
 to myself over drinks and football,
 the friend says he can see where
 things have been headed with me
 and Jane. I tell him to admit
 he’d be damned to hear about
 it, but thank him for the prompt.
 Say sure I could use a little
 grace. He changes the subject.
 “I’ve never told this story.”
 Eight years ago, he was
 backing out his car. His rotten
 family members always left
 the garbage barrels at the end
 of the driveway. He felt one
 catch under his tires. Grooved
 it a little. A thin line from stomping
 the accelerator to knock it aside.
 Maybe climb over it, it was
 dent-proof. Maybe crack it.
 A thin line, but he wasn’t running
 late, so he stilled the car and
 moved to move the barrel. Imagine,
 he said, the black shock when it
 wasn’t a garbage can, when
 a small girl with straight brown hair
 and fat glasses crawled out
 from underneath, bike still trapped,
 bloody gashes and scrapes
 up and across her legs and arms






The "we've many small things"

 example: in our pocket
 of time there are many
 floor tiles, and different
 ones. Pressed bare feet.
 Another: there is no clear
 reason for the varying
 swells of weather or
 sense. Just a sudden rain
 at the close of a hot day,
 and cooling air rushed
 through an open window.
 Many people step across
 floors and others collapse
 and die on them, as what’s
 necessary and final is to
 float around and think
 about it little. Forced un-
 thinking—that’s a difficult
 distillation. Impossibly
 even. Anne, 75-ish with
 dyed-yellow hair, is still
 gossiping. She’s at her
 desk, on her swivel-chair,
 phone to head. Small,
 specific opinions. Every
 day lunch is either a single
 tomato or a salad. “I’ve got
 my spring greens today,
 Jack. They’re just so.”
 She’s supposed to be
 selling ads. People with
 things on their minds: both
 Anne and I have walked
 across tiled floor today,
 and both of us will die.
 What we all have most clearly
 is occupation—it’s living.
 That’s due to time, as both
 time and its occupation
 are as small as anything:
 a whisper, a joke, a pin,
 some noisy hedge-trimming.
 What was the weather like
 that day? What did you have
 to drink? Everything is small
 things, we’re among the
 smallest—but with billions
 of neutrinos, expelled from
 the sun, passing through
 each of our bodies every second.
 That’s awfully intimate, so I
 tense my muscles to try them.
 A fat mug of evening coffee.
 Let’s blend again, then,
 to live. Forcibly if  necessary






 Languor

 to fall asleep and then to dream
 in a bar on Sunday afternoon; it’s thin
 and peculiar, like the balance of an ant
 stepping its suction-cup feet across
 a string of dental floss (might all be
 flux, but also fusion, planet and
 past it an autonomous fluctuant thing).
 Even upon waking, I’m viewing
 the room through a lens: everything’s
 fogged, I can tell my head was on a table,
 but all of the dividing lines—chairs,
 bottles, televisions—wave and blur
 as though they—imagined—mean
 to disappear. I’m confident they’ll
 disappear. With all eyes. Easiest,
 then, to recognize that this is not a safe
 place to be: and to fall back asleep,
 return to the kind of place where it’s easy
 to become immobilized. Where I first
 met so-and-so. Where some beloved
 dead nod knowingly, as if to imply not
 compassion alone, as I’d expected, but
 power (we should have the fortune
 to know this power).   I see them one
 at a time, and only in discreet places—
 hidden corners in a maze of halls
 and vestibules—what seems a poorly-
 planned home. It collapses under
 that weight. Walking away, to lose
 my knees and fall to my chest—could
 be anywhere in the universe, however
 close—a dream’s the easiest thing to
 remember or to forget as something in
 the whole of one’s body snaps like a thread  

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