Anchor

On days I want to hurt myself, I watch the same news he watches.

When he wakes from his drunken slumber, alone, before he fixes his shitty Folgers coffee, alone, before he gets in his ugly truck half-blasted to go fishing before the Florida sun stacks more cancerous red layers on his beet red neck, alone.

I know he sits in front of his television in his geriatric retirement condominium in the actual rectum of America and watches Pretty White Men and Ugly White Women pin the collapse of civilization on abominations like me.

I know this because when I hurt myself I can feel his shame, I steep in his humiliation. It’s as if the anchors are somehow tethered to both of us, dragging us closer to our drownings.

He thinks he knows the water. He met my mother in a hurricane. He took his little boy fishing every year for his birthday.

Every morning he sits alone with his rod softly bobbing in the tepid salt water, waiting for me to emerge from the depths and hook myself.

I learned to hold my breath beneath big city underpasses.