Self Portrait as Candle Song by Cole Pragides

Over Thanksgiving, my mother tells me that wearing black casts illusions. At first, I hear that it makes one’s body look dimmer. Outside, the daylight fades from everywhere at once. The specific music of a Northern California drizzle plays: hisses and plips as droplets coalesce and reach a terminal weight. I see my father’s silhouette through the window, the faint glow of rain bouncing off his shoulders. Some things never reach their destination. He bends down through the weeds, peering underneath the fence. 

At dinner, I fail to write poems in eye contact. We debate how to renovate the fence to keep rats out of the backyard. Their squealing arpeggio has been audible since the neighbors were ousted from their illegal housing, cast out into the neighborhood fog, their late-night Cantonese karaoke melting away. My mother posits the rabid melodies have always been here, constant as undertow. I suggest lighting the whole fence on fire. My father grabs his crushed tooth. I recall adolescence when my brother and I would scream out into the Pacific, the phones are dead, until we were answered with the sun’s pink retreat—the sky mercurial, our voices uncovered. 

After having our fill of chicken, curry, and facts about the streetlights going out up and down the block, we try to shake the night. Love can be a tool. I’m visiting home; Yesterday an old friend told me that my astigmatism is the reason I see all the streetlights as stars; another asked me when I would be leaving my parent’s house to go home. I can hide a tool under my tongue. I listen for familiar singing through walls and hear only the unbroken drizzle, water trying not to split. My father is taking what I understood for pain. I recall the first time I saw myself through the eyes of another. I was burned and beautiful, flickering under manufactured light. 

We’re taking my grandparents halfway home next month. I wish we could take them all the way. Their children say they would never make it. I’m confused—going back is easier; There would be no forgetting this time, only remembering. My grandparents acquiesce. They were two young lovers who took turns speaking English so their children, whose births bookended their journey, could understand them. We share this blood and almost nothing more, the tax of immigration. My father has prescribed my body weight to hold the fence up. He has as many tools as I have teardrops. A candle burns from the inside out. 

When we get halfway there, my whole family will sit at a round table and eat dinner. The collage of our arms resting on the polyurethane will replicate natural wooden variegation. Love will be a demonstration of surface tension. Our hands will remain on our own plates as I try to light my grandmother into stories of home. My twin cousins will insist on going to the island’s beach to tan, despite begging from the beige members of my family born elsewhere. I will not go to the water because I will be scared to disrobe, revealing to my family how I made my body feel like home. I will stay in the shade and stand by the table. A group of glowing hands can fan or obscure a light. 

The table will be just large enough that everyone is out of reach of each other. I will have just obtained a new prescription, and look around to see sharper the square jaws and soft lips of those around me reflected as shadow puppets on my ribcage. There will be light faltering from purple to black. I will support my grandmother’s hand as she pours a glass of the blood of Our Lord and Savior. My grandparents will remind us they must wake up early: they never miss Saturday mass. My aunt will lean against a wall and joke that they confess enough for us all. Some walls are shared more than others. My father will theorize that religion was invented alongside alcohol and that zero-proof beers can still be a vice. A vice is only a vice if you give it to yourself. A sacrifice is only a body if it can be touched. A body is only a sacrifice if there are witnesses. I guess I would be a useless martyr. This blood casts no shadows. This body flickers like a candle. I’ll say I love you. They’ll say you mean it this time. 

I recall the stuffed black-capped chickadee that my mother got me from the zoo when I was a child. It recited a birdsong when I pressed the red button on its abdomen. I would throw the beautiful American bird against the walls and command it to fly. Eventually, with its wings dismembered, its fur falling off in clumps, and its song transformed into a squealing, bruised palimpsest, it came to resemble a rat. 

I close my curtains, shutting out the streetlights. Pressing my ear to the walls, I can just make out rat families scuttling across rainy borders and huddling together, overhearing dim stories like little bonfires in the dark. Love can be the recasting of shadows. On some islands, candles are known to burn towards one another. 

This is how I flickered. I opened up the stars of manufactured light. I cut a hole in the abdomen of the flightless bird, and stuffed it full of tools. A man turned around into the backseat, tool in hand. Ever since, I have been treading through weeds, trying to gather back my strips of beige, searching for clothes I will never find. The rats, neighbors, and I cried out into the night. This body has melted and hardened again and again. To be a candle is to spend a lifetime trying to light yourself. Forgiving myself is an exercise in loving without witnesses. Tonight I am toolless, alight, and alive, burning my song through the walls. 

I’ll say I’m calling. They’ll say we hear you.

Cole Pragides has been a Semifinalist for the Adroit Prize, a Finalist for the Plentitudes Prize, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His work has recently been published or is forthcoming in Poet’s Row, West Trade Review, River Heron Review, and Frontier Poetry. Find him flying a kite.

19 September 2025