Some nights she walks out to the driveway where the lilacs blooms and lies down on the warm pavement even though the neighbors will see and wonder what kind of woman does such things.
There she stares up at the slender moon and thinks about the baby albatross filled with discarded spoons or the time a friend asked what she was working on these days and she answered, “Who has the time?” even though she meant something else entirely.
Across the lawn the crickets sing while the earth lets out its tired breath and wanders through the trees to greet her.
I suffer a different kind of loneliness. From the antique ringtones of singing wrens, crying babies, and ballad medleys, my ears have turned to brass.
They resurrect a thousand extinct birds, Emus, dodos, and shelducks, though some, like the cerulean glaucous macaw, could not survive the snow. How heavily they roost on trees in raw twilight.
I will not admire those birds, not when my dull head throbs, I am plagued by sorrow, a green hummingbird eats me alive with its stinging needle beak.
Then I meet you. Our courtship is fierce in a prudish city that scorns our love, as if the ancient laws of miscegenation are still in place. I am afraid I will infect you
after a virus clogs the gift economy: booming etrade of flintlock guns sag. Status updates flip from we are all connected to we are exiles. What bullshit
when in that same prudish city, they have one exact word to describe the shades of their sorrow, when they always sit together and eat noodles during white days of rain, in one long table, though not all.
As a boy, my father used to trap little brown sparrows, bury them in hot coal, and slowly eat the charred birds alone in the green fields, no sounds, no brothers in sight.
Holiest are those who eat alone. Do not hurt them, do not push them, insult them, do not even stare at them, leave them to eat alone, in peace.
live in the layers 