Lane Devers

Is this thing on?

You have to forgive me, not because I am sorry but because
we are on one of those orange inflatable water slides that spring out
of the sides of airplanes when they unexpectedly land in water and we are all
saying things we don’t mean. An elderly man tries to bring his suitcase onto the slide
and is scolded by another passenger. You must help yourself before you can
help others. It is all so cliché. I used to pick my skin, then watch reality TV
about people who drink nail polish and eat large portions of their sofa.
I used to want to die at sea. I used to watch that show about crabbing in Alaska,
where angry men fight about things other than crabs, but relate each of their
non-carb issues back to the fact they haven’t found crabs. They talk about their families
back on land—wives, sometimes children, usually their dads who have died looking
for crabs. I want to tell you I died looking for you to wave back from the shore
but we are stranded in the center of lake Michigan, somewhere between Chicago
and Traverse City, and I haven’t looked at the water or for a shoreline, not once.

Lane Devers is from Carbondale, Colorado. His work has appeared or is forthcoming from places like the Adroit Journal, Heavy Feather Review, DREGINALD, Juked, and elsewhere. His first chapbook “Antarctica is not the Moon” is out from Beyond Words Press. He is a student in Portland, Oregon.