Potato
Cannon
Todd Clason
Actually, Steve has two potato cannons, the broken
one
leaned on the outdoor pool table, and this, with
machined aluminum joints between the plastic PVC
breech and barrel that Todd Fee made. It's
true
I'm only here as a sidekick to a friend,
but I remember
these guys from grade school, admire them for
obsessing. Just look at all of their gadgets,
the jukebox wired with Stone Roses and Shriekback,
a
line of hanging plastic skulls blinking with phone
rings,
black and white checkerboard on the kitchen floor,
spreading strangely up the fridge,
they even brewed the beer on tap in the garage;
Dante
made it to the library for the first time looking
for recipes.
Wait, I think Steve is aiming the cannon—I
like to imagine
him calibrating the trajectory against constellations,
although there isn't much to see of the
sky under the
awing, and this November isn't clear.
But the exactness of his preparation, mashing
wide
Michigan potatoes down the barrel with a broken
pool
cue, just two squirts of White Rain hair spray
with
enough ether to explode, this precision
can distract me from the slowness of seasons,
help the
seeing into days past, when I forgot to look for
potential
explosions, not gazing long enough at the two
Chicago
girls washing at the Manistee
Laundromat, finishing another bibliography instead
of
sitting on the Oleander's headstone for
the setting sun.
And it isn't sadness or lass that makes
me silently
memorize Steve's sparker mechanism and drink
his
yeasty beer; it is an attempt to learn a simple
moment,
to name the expression bent on the eyebrows of
passing women, to slow myself from all the necessary
plans of the future and sit down hard and drunk
in a
single day.
The neighbors wonder about the chest-thump sounds,
though, and every so often the cops drive by.
Steve fires the cannon far out into a GM parking
lot dimly
lit with Sulfur lights. We laugh and reload, but
I wonder if
the falling potatoes still hold some vegetable
energy,
some organic acid to eat through fractured concrete
down to dirt, water and chance. I shut my eyes
and
listen in the sound of dwindling energy, forgetting
about
who is watching an how I fit in with this long
division of
friendship; this is just a moment.
In the distance, the starchy blank essence of
Steve's
potatoes will send out green shoots from ruined
projectiles. And maybe this resilience will grow.
Doodle by John Schilling.
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