These Are the Dreams Now
5 days ago
1 min read
By Mitchell Nobis
They used robots with magnets to clear the playground of casings. It took all morning. They had dogs too. The sun never rose dark gray murk you could see through.
I climbed the hill on top of the school, picked up rusty railroad spikes. I woke thinking of the rusty railroad spike 1 kept as a toy when I was their age, a Snake Eyes action hero creeping around the soon-to-be defunct rain tracks. They shipped in lava rocks for the track beds. Not the glacial stones we were used to in the yards and fields.
The track bed stones were full of holes, like the school. Full of holes, like us. Brain scans show black holes on the brain where the damage is permanent, where the damage can't be undone, where the damage is a hole torn into a kindergarten sun.
Mitchell Nobis is a writer and K-12 public school teacher in Metro Detroit where he lives with his family and dog. He is the author of The Size of the Horizon, or, / Explained Everything to the Trees (Match Factory Editions, 2025) and the forthcoming collection Beginning to Sense (Match Factory Editions, 2026). For more, see mitchnobis.com or find him falling apart on a basketball court.
