My Cardboard Balcony

by Belinda Roddie If you stare at the ceiling for long enough, it looks like it's moving. Like a cracked, white ocean, undulating without moonlight. Pulsing without an actual pulse. I remember sailing across a white ocean once. My skiff took me to four countries, and everyone spoke the same language, but never a language that I understood. Their tribes collected stones and pocketed seashells to use as currency, and their councils ruled that I was inferior to them. I was not a god, they decreed, but a fragment of a civilization that had fallen due to buffoons and warmongers. I listened to their judgment and decided to accept it. Their punishment was to live with the guilt. Sometimes, that's worse than prison or execution. I've been lying on this same bed in the same room for seventeen days. I haven't slept. I haven't eaten. The last thing I drank was a bad margarita at a joint where my ex-girlfriend worked as a bartender. She told me that if she weren...

Here we are again, on my cardboard balcony, overlooking an ocean of paper and words. I'd offer you champagne, but I don't have much extra cash for good bubbly, so here's a hard cider served in a flute instead. A toast to the poets, the crazy people with too many sentences forming narratives in their heads. I hope you find comfort on a balcony that somehow withstands the rare California rain.