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When I was seventeen I did a dangerous thing: Rung by rung, I rose into forbidden space, climbing as an insect would along a slender blade of wiregrass. At the top of the tower I settled into thin stratus. I took in my home town, insignificant and benign: car headlights sliding on roads to park below neon drugstore signs, yellow house windows and amber streetlights— whole neighborhoods stretched out like fields lit by electric flowers. I’m sure I saw the glowing orange tip of the cigarette my girlfriend was smoking, rocking herself away from me on her metal front porch swing. While I cowered there in that aerie, the air reeked of rain, smoke, and despair. I remember my heart, syncopated and suffering; how it pulsed beneath a scaffolding of bones— a buried, burning flare.
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Dec 1, 2016
Dec 1, 2016 at 9:27 AM UTC
Radio Tower Two
When I was seventeen I did a dangerous thing: Rung by rung, I rose into forbidden space, climbing as an insect would along a slender blade of wiregrass. At the top of the tower I settled into thin stratus. I took in my home town, insignificant and benign: car headlights sliding on roads to park below neon drugstore signs, yellow house windows and amber streetlights— whole neighborhoods stretched out like fields lit by electric flowers. I’m sure I saw the glowing orange tip of the cigarette my girlfriend was smoking, rocking herself away from me on her metal front porch swing. While I cowered there in that aerie, the air reeked of rain, smoke, and despair. I remember my heart, syncopated and suffering; how it pulsed beneath a scaffolding of bones— a buried, burning flare.
jonathan-witte
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Dec 1, 2016
Dec 1, 2016 at 9:27 AM UTC
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