An Afternoon in Asheville by Benjie Salazar

Last evening at AyurPrana listening room

Florist and Allegra Krieger played from Jellywish and Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine

As a thunderstorm befell the city in the mountains and our seated knees this

human next to us hollers affectionately to Allegra between Come and Into Eternity

and I keep turning my head trying to catch people’s bodies near me what they might be

thinking there are few phones out the sound guy is so good we can hear the rain

beginning to pelt I wait in the down stairway to the bathroom and meet this artist

named Savannah she repeats my name and holds out her hand for me to meet with my

own and says she has a show on the 8th of June this woman behind me asks if she was

at Josh’s the other day and they talk about the house show they put together but Savannah doesn’t

leave me behind and says how she was just talking to me about making music

looking into my eyes and we make similar gestures talking about records and the piano from

paradox we had just experienced in the same room Emily on stage says they are

playing one from deep in the catalog The Fear of Losing This and the drums vibrate in such a way

Cass begins to cry next to me and this pair of voices say she is just like me for real

behind us and we both laugh with tears in our eyes paired with the night and the rain

hitting our windshield our cigarette smoke against the old church or the way we

talk to our friends in the hallway to our bedrooms as Leo gifts me string lights to hang from

above me and the night pours as the day begins again in ways I wanted which

are slow mediated and nothing is all that painful for a little while until the world

strikes once again there is radiance and becoming from new language in the ring

from the noise box and the Carolina Wrens or the broken dryer machine

and the gas powered stove the downstairs conversation the eyes across the room

or the passing smile in the lobby there are alternative possibilities in the room

behind the car where the gravel rotates around our rubber and we hang smiles in the

afternoon as a florist works behind the counter and we try to rotate stillness and lightness into

our routine into this way of sitting of standing of sleeping during the

afternoon.