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EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

 
from THE FREQUENCIES
by Noah Eli Gordon

They were erecting a new tower near the railyard, playing on our mistrust of the tracks. You told me you always wanted to hop a train, that it would cauterize your radio wounds, cancel the pitch. You can bleed from the nose while nobody's looking, while these digressions make even the grass sing like an enemy. It's official -- I got my certificate in the mail this morning. I emptied my change jar over the fresh tar of the repaved road in front of the station. Sure, it's a cheap rite of passage, but you try mixing rechargeable batteries into pumice, see how many postcards you get.

Someone had broken into the station, leaving a conspiracy of creation myths in the wake of each footprint. All the wires were pulled from the console. The police dusted the dials, turned our pockets inside-out, left with a family of scorpions who'd burrowed under the buttons. I'm afraid to open my radio. All the evidence boiled out. The grass, unthreading under my shoes. I keep checking for stingers. My radio's been walking with a variable foot & maybe I'm projecting here, but I tell it everything. Everything except I wants to be a radio.

The window was open this afternoon
It was covered with a blue curtain
It offered a certain sense of absolution
The radio was set in the sidewalk
Someone had left it to dry in the cement overnight
It was still playing
We threw quarters, held hands when no one was looking
There was a helicopter passing when you spoke
The traffic thinned
The sound coming through was only an imitation of the sound
The radio did nothing to reconfigure it
"I hate it when you talk about everything in metaphors," I remembered you once saying
I was wondering about the skyline
I was wondering why you'd walk around all day wearing headphones
I was wondering if people are more apt to be themselves with music around

The thing about it is you never know how many people are listening, on the bus, in the backyard, digging their hands in to come up with calculus, asking is this what counts, where it gets us. If I could turn everything off, would my only sustainable resource be electric enough to recognize the form the radio waves unwrite in an hour, binding us to what we think we've said more than the sound of our own voice? Mine was slightly distorted over the air. You said, "I can tell it's a long drive when I start running out of stations." Concerned about the pages missing from the logbook, I was having a Coke with another DJ when you walked into the station. "You know," you said, "you could dissolve a nail in that." No wonder the paintings won't stay on my walls. The last stitch of intimacy weaves the radio to a loose end.