—I WANNA BE NEW AND DIFFERENT, ANYTHING I’M NOT

The Day the Earth Bounced

     You were going to tell me about the otters, their adorable paw-holding night dreams, how you saw a pair floating beyond the damn that corroded and clotted our dreams.

     You were going to tell me about the basket of babies, gawking at the moon, pointing at the lopsided stars shaking their stubby toes with glee.

     You were going to tell me something you forgot to tell me, perhaps a remedy for remorse and regret, a magic polish to burnish all of my morose bones.

     You were going to tell me you loved me, or you said you would, but then that tree fell, the earth bounced, and a thick dust buried everything.

—YOU KNOW I’D LIKE TO KEEP MY CHEEKS DRY TODAY

Duped

I died today, but you weren’t there to notice.  They buried me in a field of elder straw where the shrews and deer mice play.  A herd of elk thundered over me, their hooves punching fists into the soil around my coffin.  In the distance, a murder of crows tore a hole through the lining of the sky before ripping themselves apart.  By nightfall, the rains came in torrents, seeping through the ground like hands sifting sludge, tapping on my wood-and-brass casket.  For a moment, I thought it was you, coming to see me, to say you missed me, but then I realized you were gone, and that I was dead.

—I’VE BEEN LOOKING SO LONG AT THESE PICTURES OF YOU THAT I ALMOST BELIEVE THAT THEY’RE REAL

A History of Soup

It had nothing to do with forensics.  At least I don’t think.  It was all about soup.  Soup and the smell of grass clippings, the garbled sunshine and the slick salesperson who showed up that summer carrying an armful of forged coupons, begging to live with us.

Those were airtight afternoons.  Straight-jacket air.  My sister hummed ekphrastic inside a cage of it.  Her lips were too chapped, her dress a frail fence.

But back to the soup.  To the Borscht.  We shouldn’t have been served it, but there were just too many beets.  Mother worried about infestation and the salesman still lived with us.

I didn’t see it, only read the corollary in Sis’s diary.  How one day her soup bowl grew a diving board on the rim.  How when she hit the surface, carmine-colored broth blasted across the walls, across the head of the table. 

It was a shock.  Like booming thunder, heard and unseen.

I keep expecting Sis to re-emerge, poke her head up from the Borscht.  I keep expecting those wall stains to fade or speak, but they never do.