Florida Man Claims Wife was Kidnapped by Holograms

Paul David Adkins

 

Who hasn’t thought this?

She is

here                                      then here                                                           then

                                                                                                                here.

She cannot be touched;

his hand goes right through her face.

It’s not the drugs, not what

the doctor calls

delusions.

                                                                Sometimes, her voice is off,

vibrato or robotic. Sometimes

he can smell the ozone burn

like a stroke of lightning,

and she’s flickering pixels.

 

He reaches for keys:

she’s there.

 

He feels for her hand:

he’s holding a rock.

 

The world is full of evil, he says, full of

dimensions disrespecting our reality, or something.

 

His wife is trapped in a mirror somewhere,

in glass, far away.

 

Yanked through a portal,

snatched through a shimmering stone.

 

 

 

♦♦♦

Paul David Adkins (he/him/his) earned an MFA from Washington University. In 2021, Xi Draconis will publish his collection Long Time Burning. Journal publications include Badwater, Kissing Dynamite, Spillway, and Barzakh. He has received one Best of the Net and six Pushcart nominations and the 2019 Central NY Book Award for Poetry.