The welding-fused wendigo
creates itself from city dust, salt and clay. From my bed, I hear it mewl out a newborn cry down
the block. My eardrum holds the sound. Robotic. Crackly like a fingernail chipping a painted
wall naked. Youngstown is the womb, and we all are the guilty party—the ones who thrusted the
seed. Every light flickers—the moon skips a beat. Scrap, old wire, and two bowls of molten steel
earthworm-inch to the bastard cell. A clomp. A shimmy. A sear. This life—this baby—grows
seven feet tall, sucking in city junk, gaining mass, clanking down my street with its fire eyes in
its fleshless hands. Hiding behind my bunk, I see it trying to suffocate itself in its own chest, hear
its motherless moans. It shoos itself away into nothing, into the city’s black, escaping the
haunting thumps of heartbeats that it can’t help but perceive in every direction except down
below its own chin.
Dom Fonce is an undergrad English major at Youngstown State University. His work has been published in, or is forthcoming in, Junto Magazine, The Tishman Review, 3Elements Literary Review, Obra/Artifact, COG, Blacklist Journal, Ohio’s Best Emerging Poets: An Anthology, West Texas Literary Review, GNU Journal, Fourth and Sycamore, Great Lakes Review, and elsewhere. He can be reached at [email protected].