2 March 2018

I want to write an honest sentence about my dog hunting rain on the lanai. She paws at concrete, as if to dig up drops, then shakes her head after a direct hit. Two more dead this morning in central Michigan. The more I aim to digress, the closer I come to the exact point of violence, cut like an abrupt angle. Even angels avoid us now, as their wings aren't bullet proof. Make your walls of Kevlar, but keep your AR-15s. Happiness is a warm gun, though the singer's voice is just a character. Not as sincere as the man who took him as his muse, or the one who took his life. Where do we take them? To other islands, remote ones where people still play hermit? Do we carry them like luggage, stopping to feel badly about those items we failed to check off our morning list? You need a life coach to get you through this scatter, one to call each morning and cheer you up. A cheerleader appeared in my head and waved her pompoms for me; I don't like cheerleading, but I did her, even in pink. My friend writes about angels, and I'm glad he does because someone needs to let them in the screen door to entertain us. A brush of wings and I'm aware my dog wants to hunt them, all apart from the Fed Ex package they leave by the door. A father screams that his daughter was “hunted” by the boy. The amendment is for hunters; semi-automatics are great for hunting frogs. My dog ended up at Feather & Fur after catching a toad. They washed her mouth out for an hour. A neighbor's dog died of it. When I got to class that day in south London (one man recognized accents street by street by street), they looked at me, the lone American. No, I hadn't heard.

--2 March 2018