3 July 2018

I want to write an honest sentence. A dream of pink bodies on the beach spliced with one of dead brown children. Pull your focus in, three monk seals dead of what cat shit contains. Bryant says he hates to kill roaches. Time is an engine, but Belgium's a damn freight train. That was not a traditional head butt, the announcer opines of the Colombian player on the line. When the bereaved party tells her story, you must not include judgment in your mirroring. We have confiscated your words at the border, shrink-wrapped them to avoid damage. An undamaged word floats in a no-gravity space, cannot find its sentence even as it dreams of bridges and forests and a GPS so powerful it creates the landscape while miming it. We've lowered the warning levels, though each hour packages several small earthquakes that lead to a larger one, house shaking like a boat at dock. You get your land legs back by flying to another island. There are birds here, too, and morning rain that makes the dog limp and tired. A naked pink doll sits beside a red trike on our walk and I don't have my phone to take it. I am ardently civil to the pot-bellied man who walks the one-eyed dog and calls himself a lonely centrist. He hates Trump, but he loathes Hillary more. Told me I fit in at the university, all those leftists. The mail carrier in pith helmet mutters about my long vacation, and I'm tempted to leave him my resume, but who the hell cares. He plays the market, goes to Vegas to take classes, talks your ear off about how to make money. I like him, too. The door opens, I'm typing, and Bryant asks if I'm writing.

--3 July 2018