29

Goodbye spring drip, goodbye stupid dreams, goodbye revival, goodbye quiet, goodbye You, goodbye Me, goodbye We. At least for a little while.

28

Toy. Plastic Toy. Molded in China. Loved by little boy. Hated by little boy’s mother. Thrown away one blustery, bright day. Picked up by Garbage Man, held onto. Given to baby daughter who cherished for months. Grew tired of Toy and left in park finally. Buried under heaps of sand and remained, dirty, unwanted, old. Teenager digs up, uses in film, left to wither when done. Dog finds Toy in teenager’s room, pierces hole in it with teeth. Toy cries but is not heard because there is no one to hear. Mother gives Toy to dog but dog is now disinterested and leaves toy alone. Toy then gets rained on, snowed on, rained on, stepped on, grown on, lived on. Toy dies, but his body is still in the backyard, sometimes the birds peck, the dog sniffs. 1,000 years later Toy’s body has finally disintegrated - there is nobody there to rejoice or be saddened.

27

I guess I liked it because it was green. That dripping green. The kind of green that you could suck on it, and its marrow would fill you up, that life-green. You could call it lush but see when someone says lush I just think of alcoholics and how they drown themselves so yes, they are lush, but so poison filled that if you licked them you’d die of their toxicity, if you smelled them you’d grow weak with their fumes. Not fertile either. See when someone says fertile I think of a poor deprived woman, weary and tired of giving birth because her husband doesn’t believe in birth control and she doesn’t want them anymore not really but loves them anyways of course and almost dies once in childbirth, her seventh I think, but her husband keeps on trucking.

No, this green was the algae on a pond in spring when it takes over and just smiles at you, proud to be a conqueror. Or the green of the bile at the end of your vomit, when you’ve expelled the last bits of water and food and now it’s just green and it bites you in the mouth, and you were dying before, almost dead at any rate, and now you’re alive and it’s green green green green.

26

The night David met Mabel was unlike anything he had ever experienced, or would ever experience again in his whole life. The grass by the monument glowed neon with that fat moon up above, and David felt like he had never been anywhere else in his entire life, that his existence was in this minute. For nobody else, only for Love would David have gone down to the river. The sand by the river was illuminated by a bonfire and there were hundreds of people. Love was surrounded by people.

25

I saw seven ducklings today.

24

Dear ____

You already know how much I wanted you. How my earliest memory is of wishing for you, of forcing tears from my eyes for you. You already know how happy I was when you emerged, a boiled lobster, a kidney bean, a part of my before and after. I beat you by a decade, love. By ten years of dreams.

You are a funny bunny, a magician’s trick. A cavorting porpoise, a vacuum cleaner who roars until it is shut down, turned off, made to be, forced to be

Silent

Giggling girl, little one, BE LOVELY. Be lovely and be wise. The tricks we were taught - to be good, true, wholesome, loving. Practice them. Do not give them up for new tricks, no matter how alluring they may seem. Quicksand! Smoke and Mirrors! Beware pornography of purpose. Beware slurps of shallowness. Beware knocks of knowledge.

Most of all, watch out for grudges. Be careful to wring your anger out every day, squeeze it until it drips every drop out.

I can say this because I had a head start, little one. These are the lessons I ran by, the ones I held. The ones I still must learn, the ones I wish for you.

You chew life in earnest. You are a sweet one. Catch up to me. Pass me.

Sincerely yours, love always, dreaming of you

- bethie

23

I was surprised to see that he looked the same, disheveled, yes, dirty, yes, but as he was always. I supposed I had expected him to be shrunken and skulking, with great dark half moons under his eyes, with odd growths and stains coming from his rumpled clothes, and similarly odd hairs emerging from various parts of his body. I guess the only difference was that everyone knew. That now looks directed towards him were pity filled, cow-eyed.

Looking at him more closely, I realized that there was something different about him. I didn’t notice it before because he did anything and everything to distract the average looker from it. Twitched his nose. Flicked his finger. Blinked his eyes. Loosened his shoulders.

It was the haze, the orb of loss.

As if a magnet was pulling him closer and closer towards itself, as if his skin was being stretched to that place where HE was. I’ve heard many people contemplate suicide after their loves die. But I don’t think it’s contemplation, I don’t think it’s wild, luminous thoughts. I think it’s a magnet, a force that tries to pull you from one place to another. HE was his other half, the pole of one to which matched only one.