“Aggravated Man Stubble” by K. S. Edgar

We are a Super Organism growing in spacetime. As a tiny cluster of cells within this organism, K. Shawn Edgar lives in Oregon. Since receiving a renal transplant from Legacy Good Samaritan, the Greater Portland Metropolitan Area is K. Shawn’s ever-present Mother Ship. Bicycles, soluble fiber, and fiction transfusions are ongoing. Recent publications include: The Bookends Review, AMP: Hofstra University, Uppagus Literary Magazine, and Oregon State University’s The Prism.

Aggravated Man Stubble @ Angled Overpass 16

A non-human animal never screams, “I can’t shove my head any further up my ass.” Not in English, and it’s better off for it.
These words we humans curl, color the Dutch-shovel gray glow of the full moon burnt umber; rakishly bleeding all meaning from thought and sending harsh echoes flying overhead.
The pearl-eyed woman at the micro-grocery shop, which is tucked under the overpass, tells me she’s learning to think outside her box of fleshy, interstitial curves. But she’s always dampened by the memory of hard toothpick words from the gnarled mouths of fancy car drivers.
This woman, dressed in full metal apron, collects small-talk shrapnel and compresses it slowly into diamonds.
Outside her box—I’m thinking it’s lively luck to be—drips the swirl of red or blue Slushie. You never fully drink its spinning, twisting, cosmos-breaking depths dry.
And the other animals never scream, “We can’t shove our heads any further up, up, up…!”
But the glossy-eyed grocery lady often feels a desire to… because all the men she meets have angry, scruffy, shadowed faces. Dark pretzel breath. Alcohol sting. Their fallacious, heavy presence has begun to dull her pearl-shine eyes.
In winter, under the overpass, I always lie with my knees drawn up; words curling up the concrete sky angles.
I buy warmth from the micro-grocery and spend nights thinking through other people’s problems. I harvest dream seeds from body language. And the pearl-eyed woman is a bounty of spring starts: False fathers—ignorers and abusers all—who punish with silence and scorn, beget
daughters who tend to draw their never-fully-grown knees and voices around older men.
It’s their inwardly curved form and feelings—stunted—outwardly projected into every dimension of negative space until they break the specter of unfulfilled praise. The pearl-eyed woman has shown me this mutable truth with a simple timid wink that belies her hardened resolve.

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