I can’t remember why “boomerang” brings me so painfully into my own sights. The medicine has stopped nothing, nor was it intended to. These twin jars of split peas, I boil them for days. They will not soften, as I do. I try to work up the nerve to listen to some music. Is it so wrong to end a sentence with a pronoun? I haven’t licked a stamp for years, not with this tongue. You have to run to taste the wind, says my dog from his leash, says my friend from Orofino, to his. Chase the grass, then, in the wind down a long hill. Suffering is not, as it turns, its own schadenfreude. My friend stayed wrong about that. My stomach: still tender where she shot it, though I did not feel anything at the time. I felt nothing. It was quicker than the fall of an eyelash. The beauty berry bushes have spread, and their day-glo fruit hangs in bends throughout the forest. Words that matter can’t be words.
Further Reading
Clean Hands by William B. Robison
Cup your hands over your face, breathe deeply you can smell upon your fingers and palms the history of the day and maybe even the evening before—a pungent olfactory document recorded in sweat, musk, coffee, dirt, grease cheeseburgers till the hand soap vandals come marauding gothic goop-mongers eradicating the evidence of another epoch tuck your […]
Ladies at the Club
Yesterday at the swim club in Berkeley, two women about my age were sitting in the hot tub, giggling about adventures on beaches along the opposite coast. I joined them. When they asked about my teenage memories of the same, I hesitated. I don’t know them except as our paths cross at the pool. I […]
Crack
by R.B. Mertz
In Homewood you trip on the broken sidewalks i know are there in the mostly white neighborhoods but i notice them less like there is more fresh paint there is more time for landscaping when you don’t spend two hours while the sun comes up on Mother’s Day to stay with Mr. Jeff’s body so […]
