from Letter From Someone who Lived inside a Diamond Room for One Million Years

Dominic Gualco

Some mornings I wake before the trumpets start playing and it feels like a victory. Some days I wake in the wine cellar of the house I catered the previous night. These are the best mornings, when I am in a wine cellar and have beaten the trumpeters. If I listen closely on these mornings, I can hear them marching to the river, where the banks are diamond. I listen for their direction, so I can find the rivers they march along, but once they begin to play I am finished. Their music winds into my ears and through my body, licking my heart and I begin to shake on the floor, asking why God has hidden himself between the ceiling vent, why he will not just place himself on my body—a chronic cut below my ear, a peculiarly-shaped birthmark, anything but these oversized ears and these ribs which are too narrow.

Dominic Gualco is from Sacramento, California. His writing has been featured at Hobart, Big Lucks and elsewhere. He is the author of the space between knucklebones (Scrambler Books, forthcoming).