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.
