FICTION 01

DANIEL J. CALFO

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It’s where all my big ideas come from, dreaming.

Their heads were slightly bowed but not so much as to hide their eyes. All the feelings of fog and rain but nothing of the weather. No setting; it’s not missing, just pale in comparison, frightened with the weight of it all. They knew that I knew. I was getting up from something. I’d been fighting something the way somebody fights something quietly, sitting, in clothes clean and pressed and they remain that way through the dirt and scraping and that eventual first breath, which happened to be, for me, this dream.

They kept knowing, growing with it, knowing I wanted them to know desperately we were friends and they knew; us, copies of each other discovering the fact. They became more me, I more them, the result a balance, symmetry, precision.

It was looking into a dozen mirrors, it’s all one person, he’s a stranger, blink, she’s the quiet girl with the glasses in the back of English class blink he’s the pastor you admired as a man, hated as a theology blink she’s mom blink the first dead person you ever saw blink she says I Love You, you say nothing and the back of your eyelids are no longer black; they called it seeing the light.

They stare back. Think about how well you have been able to go through the motions of living until this point, the audacity of the love it took for these versions of you to watch you kick around, so blind. How they waited for you to look around, living with you, so closely.

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Daniel Calfo writes out of Portland, OR.  Daniel was a member of The Sparrow Ghost Collective’s first Slam Poetry Team of 2011and competed with the team in Portland’s Northwest Regional Slam. In the coming months, Daniel will help represent Lewis and Clark College at both the ACUI Regional Slam in Portland, OR, as well as at the College Union Poetry Slam Invitational, this year held in Los Angles, CA.Daniel has been a featured poet in the Portland Poetry Slam’s Encyclopedia Show and in Portland’s staple poetry open-mic, Word Out! A Poetry Open Mic. Some of his work is published in print in The Sparrow Ghost Collective’s first anthology of poetry and digitally via Pipe Dream Publishing. Some of the author’s other work, including original photographs, appear at (http://danielcalfo.tumblr.com), while the majority will be available in his first collection to be printed in the coming months. For questions or comments, address notes to DanielCalfo@Lclark.edu.