Alex Dimitrov
Assistant Editor Caitlin Doyle: In “The Sun,” Alex Dimitrov explores both the beauty and peril inherent in the sun’s “exacting brightness,” a light that simultaneously brings revelation and threatens annihilation. Dimitrov’s sun acts as a figurative gauge of the tension between concealment and exposure in our emotional lives. If many humans through the ages have worshipped the sun, “following it anywhere” until it becomes “impossible to endure,” so too have countless people pursued love past endurance. Dimitrov suggests that, though a return to darkness may inevitably follow even our most luminous states, we can only fully recognize our lives by “having had light at all,” no matter how blinding.
The Sun
At once stunning and perilous to be under it. To understand your body’s place in the order of living by the number of trips it makes around a star. To see it every day without choice more than any friend or lover. More than your own face on weeks you’re lucky to consult a mirror less. And some nights, the luck more than the will to live. Knowing exactly when it will return unlike most obsessions. How it feels to be addressed by it: never asking you to speak of the real shame and excitement lining the skin almost always. Many before have worshiped it. Followed it anywhere in that exacting brightness, slow then finally impossible to endure. Like a love affair that kept you alive for so long, and recovered the person you were before. Before evening. And fog. The life you only recognize by having had light at all.
Alex Dimitrov is the author of Together and by Ourselves (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), Begging for It (Four Way Books, 2013), and the online chapbook American Boys. He lives in New York City.
For more miCRo pieces, CLICK HERE.
