Matt Mitchell
my body is sometimes just a body living inside the body of a car traveling west. a swell of mitochondria with a plywood ass that can’t hold jeans up. a gas-efficient car dashboard heating up out-of-state thighs, vacuum fingers fucking around with the radio too much, worn-in steering wheel rubber damp like spit-coiled hands. how many of the cars we’ve passed are going to see the world’s largest frying pan. how many of them have taken more pictures of the cows than they will of the landmark itself. the world’s largest frying pan necessitates a world’s largest egg which necessitates a world’s largest chicken, unless you believe it’s the other way around. i believe the world is running out of faux leather, and the vegans will soon have to buy regular leather like the rest of us. i imagine there is someone whose only job is to pick the sky back up after it falls. what i would give to have that job, even if it pays poorly. to feel the weight of the rest of the world in my hands: it has to be better than feeling the weight of my own. what if, every time our mothers sent us to the store to buy a pound of hamburger, we returned with hunks of road asphalt wrapped in deli paper. imagine the looks on their faces when we explain we just wanted to bring home a piece of the world so many people have touched. i say we are all fucked because no one speaks bird anymore. because no one listens to kate bush anymore. because i google search weirdest midwestern landmarks and the #1 answer is miles of speeding cars pulled over onto shoulders by cops [and cops only care about a fast car because it is breaking a traffic law. but what cops don’t realize is: when you are driving fast, you can cover so much more ground. you can see so many more stars].
Matt Mitchell is a gluten-free, heartbroken, intersex writer living in Columbus, Ohio. He is the author of The Neon Hollywood Cowboy, forthcoming from Big Lucks in 2021. Find him on Twitter @matt_mitchell48.
