300(ish) Words on Mania
It was summer the very first time my cells began to race. I was seventeen. It was always summertime in my heart, that great bank of light. I sat up in the night to think shattering thoughts. I was a flesh meadow, a racehorse. I spent my time in the nearest library running my fingers across the hardened spines of books and printing out inappropriate photographs to hang in my room — cum dripping from a woman’s fingertip, a man squinting into the daylight as his cock smiled, a group of great pink, naked women. As the photos slipped out of the hot mouth of the printer in full, wet color, I couldn’t help but laugh. I laughed a lot during those weeks. Since then, there have been other times of laughter. Running around New York City at night on my own, feeling as though the neons of Times Square had been choreographed with my line of sight in mind and my mind alone. I was dazed in the deli. I was the first son in the supermarket. I stole chocolate. I looked on as I made men of the shadows in the hotel room. Unprompted, I told a man I loved rain as we rode the elevator together. The words falling like test shots from a shotgun. I couldn’t help myself. I practiced award speeches though I didn’t know what they were for, only that they were necessary. I sat on the floor of my psychiatrist’s office as she threatened to commit me if I did not comply with her rules. I threw the pills out. I meowed at the alley cats. I drank lemonade from the carton until it spilled onto the kitchen tiles. And even then. I kissed girls in stairwells. I undid time like a ribbon on a beautiful daughter’s head. Imagine a stomach full of dreams. Imagine Jesus fiddling with his wound. Imagine the first sight of blood. Imagine peering into the snow globe of heaven. Imagine cracking the glass. That wondrous crash. That slow dribble of light.
Jasmine Ledesma lives in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared or is set to appear in places like Borderlands, Vice, Rattle and [PANK] among others. Her work was also nominated for both Best of The Net and the Pushcart Prize in 2020. She was recently awarded a fellowship with Brooklyn Poets.
