Thomas McDonald

Plastic or glass?

It was just a question I asked.

(I thought it was a transparent, barely iridescent something bent in the light

of the dim evening street between the tracks where the slow trains pass.)

If plastic, what did it wrap?

That something orgasmic torn spastic from its package,

ravished and devoured, its armor stripped reckless in the open,

or perhaps elsewhere, afar, but blown here on the whims of the wind

and now lying alone suicidal on the tracks?

But if glass,

surely not smashed in some violent flash of madness?

No, it must have been an accident, by distraction perhaps,

a careless but shameful slip followed by a crash

and a numb, panicked retreat from the shrapnelled scene.

Where such a mess is left, one never looks back.

Alas, plastic or glass?

Is it just curiosity that asks?

Or does one sense at a distance the difference?

If plastic:

light, malleable bubbling crackling nothingness, so easy to trash.

But if glass:

its heavy fragility,

its dumb thud on a wooden table

and shivering shatter when windows burst and picture frames collapse,

its sharp shards cutting bare feet in the grass.

Plastic or glass?

Why even ask?

And how do you know if you can’t touch, or let go?

THOMAS MCDONALD is a 4th year PhD student in Comparative Literature at Stanford University, researching modern German- language, South Slavic, and Japanese literature in the context of economic crisis and political risk.