The Angel Gabriel Talks Me Out of It & The Angel Gabriel Says It's Not a Booty Call If He Doesn't Have Genitals,
“Venere on the road” by Dr. Matteo Bona, B.A.
The Angel Gabriel Talks Me Out of It
We are making a pros and cons list on my therapist’s orders. The Angel Gabriel thinks he would have made a good therapist. He has a calming presence, and enjoys the shape of his mouth when he says the phrase, “how does that make you feel?” While I make my list he stands at the mirror in one of my turtlenecks, trying on different listening faces. The pros list is the usual drudgery of a mind folding in on itself again and again like a piece of notebook paper passed from hand to schoolgirl hand. The cons list is everything The Angel Gabriel tells me they don’t have in heaven: neon signs shaped like flamingos, and walls on which to hang paintings of dubious quality. Heaven has trains but no train-tracks, nothing to walk down while avoiding the future. Since Heaven has no soil it has no plants, just one endless desert. There is no wind in Heaven, and therefore no wind chimes clinking softly in the predawn. No cats, only guinea pigs. No insects either, which means no dragonflies skimming the water. No water.
When the list is finished, The Angel Gabriel says we should celebrate by going out for all the foods they don’t have in Heaven. He looks handsome in my turtleneck as we share brussels sprouts, French fries, egg rolls. We pass a spoon back and forth, trading bites of black cherry ice cream.
The Angel Gabriel Says it’s Not a Booty Call if He Doesn’t Have Genitals,
And he doesn’t. He comes over at three am, pulls down his joggers and shows me what he calls “the light of pure goodness.” The light seems mediocre at best, but I go along with it. The Angel Gabriel wants intimacy in these smallest hours of the morning, so we compare embarrassing adolescent photos, me with my self-cut baby bangs, him with his infinite number of eyes. He lays on my bed, head hanging over the edge, legs stretched up against the wall. We kiss once, as the sunrise checks its watch on the other side of the horizon, but The Angel Gabriel doesn’t know how. He pulls his lips all the way back, meets mine with his perfectly straight, dry teeth. We lay side by side on the bed, and I fall asleep somewhere in the middle of The Angel Gabriel telling me which US Presidents are in hell, which is all of them. In the morning, the pillow still holds the indent of his head.
About the author
Frances Klein (she/her) is a poet and teacher writing at the intersection of disability and gender. She is the 2022 winner of the Robert Golden Poetry Prize, and the author of the chapbooks New and Permanent (Blanket Sea 2022) and The Best Secret (Bottlecap Press 2022). Klein currently serves as assistant editor of Southern Humanities Review.
About the Artist
Dr. Matteo Bona was born on January 1st, 1997, in Asti (Piedmont, Italy). He studied at the Public Scientific Lyceum Francesco Vercelli. Now he studies Foreign Languages and Modern Literature at the Università degli studi di Torino. His artwork publications accepted in American journals and magazines: "Boredom and other human vices", 805 Lit+Art; "Verlangen", Mangrove Journal (Miami University); "Die Lebensmüdgkeit", Memoir Magazine; "Die Lebensmüdgkeit", GNU Journal; "Die Vernichtung", Tenth Street Miscellany; “Verlangen”, New Plains Review (Central Oklahoma University); “The Aesthetic of the Renewal”, Waxing & Waning; "Urban Nietzsche", Rebel Satori Press; "Onyria", Sink Hollow; "Das Sezieren bei Lebensmüdigkeit", Oakland Review (Carnegie Mellon University). In July 2018, he published “Preludi” (Montag Editore), a collection of stories dealing with the troubles in contemporary existentialism. In the end of November 2018 he published “Le feritoie d’alabastro” (Ofelia Editrice). The author published in 2018 a graphic project for Cold Mountain Review called “Die Vernichtung” and he won the Appalachian State University Readers’ Choice Award for that project. In October 2019 he received the Roma Tre Academic Prize “Apollo Dionisiaco” for Figurative Art.