It’s hard to vanish with a 46-inch chest

impossible

to dissolve 320 pounds of man walking down a street

into a murky puddle that faintly

grazes strangers feet.

So you succeed only at becoming a fantastic failure

of fading away into any other form of carbon,

or even into ether or to be swallowed whole

by a hungry earth

like so many others you’ve heard of before.

If by will or wishful thinking you make it

past the street

without getting crushed

by blindly backing trucks hauling halves

of animals unluckily deemed meat 

and the impossible load of the looks that follow,

you still have to find a way to dematerialize

the rolls of you that protrude and impose

on armrests, that make every chair a nemesis,

every creak a firing squad.

Consider the absurd geometry of gravity acting 

on masses of you in places where you shouldn’t be,

the places where you yearned to become

vapour instead of form, where you daydreamed

of sublimation instead of

choosing to be or being

anything at all.

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Shrief Fadl is a 35-year-old Egyptian writer, a POC, currently living in Vancouver, BC. Before he came to live in Canada, Shrief was born and raised in Kuwait, studied in Lebanon and worked in Dubai, Doha, Abu Dhabi, and Cairo.