Cody Poynter

BLACK BOX

I used to control the weather. I used to travel through time, too. From my racecar bed, deep within my dreams, which were much more than dreams. 

But the day my father disappeared was the day I lost my powers.

Father Time and Mother Nature used to sit with me beneath the Great Oak and we’d talk and laugh—like the adults did when the kids would get sent away to bed, only I didn’t go to bed and instead listened from around the corner to what they had to say. 

It’s how I first learned about the secret channels on the Black Box hooked up to my parent’s television. 

My father mentioned the channel to his friend while my mother was outback smoking. I tuned it to that channel. The naked bodies of men and women moved against one another, their skin shining with oil.

My mother walked in on me watching that channel. Seated on her bed in my T-Rex pajamas, legs crossed, mouth agape; mother screamed. I jumped up and ran into the bathroom. She told me not to watch that channel anymore. That it’s for adults only. 

After dinner the next night, I listened as my mother told my father what she walked in on. About how they need to get that Black Box out of the house.

“He’s going to learn about it one day,” my father said.

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Father Time showed me my future—what I later learned was a phenomenon called deja vu. I saw both my joys and my heartaches. Like my first date as a teenager. Or a Valentine’s Day spent alone while my date spent it with an ex-boyfriend. I never thought any of this possible. As an overweight child, anything other than platonic love was hard to imagine. It gave me hope—hope that my father’s mother tried to carve out of me. She was always telling me to toughen up; that nobody loves fat.

He showed me the indelible image of the fogged morning my mother sat at the foot of my bed, sobbing. This vision he cut short. Told me that I wasn’t ready for it. “In due time,” he said. Followed by, “All things fall apart.” When I woke that morning after this vision, the family dog ransacked my room. The Lego roller coaster my father helped me build destroyed.

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Mother Nature let me control the weather. Only in the winter though. She explained that school closures were easier to manage then with a well-placed snowstorm. While my friends wore pajamas inside out and ate ice cream the night before in a ritualistic attempt to summon snow, I was behind the wheel. 

Sometimes I pushed the clouds away from Baltimore to prove they had no power.

After one of the many fights between my parents—this one about father’s upcoming business trip—Mother Nature granted me permission to call forth a blizzard. It shocked the weathermen how strong it was. Two-feet of snow blanketed most of the state, closing schools for a whole week. 

I was proud of myself.

Father left despite my significant snowfall.

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“Rage,” Mother Nature told me, “can be a dangerous thing.”

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Sometimes, when father wasn’t around, I’d go to the closet in the basement where he hid his Playboy magazines and ripped them to pieces. The tattered pieces of women’s bodies scattered along the floor, accumulated like snow.

He never said a word about it to me.

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COTY POYNTER IS THE AUTHOR OF TWO POETRY BOOKS. HIS MOST RECENT, DELIRIUM: COLLECTED POEMS, WAS PUBLISHED BY BOWEN PRESS. HIS WORK HAS APPEARED IN
BLACK FOX LITERARY MAGAZINE, EQUINOX, GRUB STREET, AND UNDERWOOD PRESS. HE LIVES IN BALTIMORE WITH HIS PARTNER, THEIR CAT PUDGE AND DOG TYCHO,
ALONG WITH A HODGEPODGE OF PLANTS.