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
TIME an entry from A Whaler’s Dictionary by Dan Beachy-Quick
Time grants us the simple goodness of life, but also takes it away. We change and we witness change in the world, and both types of flux occur within time. While we live the world exists for us, and though none can say if the world ceases to exist when we’ve ceased to exist, there […]
Clear Skies, Unseasonably Cold
by Jackie Craven
The day Challenger launched, we watched CNN from the bar at Canaveral Pier. Mist rose from icy water. Tourists sipped Piña Coladas with pineapple and paper flags. Giddy voices chanted time in reverse: Twenty-one seconds till liftoff. Or—Did the announcer say we’re down to twelve? My husband’s lips turned blue in the uncertain morning light. […]
self-portrait as rodent
by Sophie Hall
my sister tells me what it’s like to run across the roof of a repair shop: it made noises like the Mount Storm floor and I thought I was going to fall everywhere. . almost-euphemism—the floor of our fear . holds the name of our […]