Peel each piece of clothing off as if it was chainmail: heavy, protective. Look at yourself in the mirror and think about the person you were. Wonder who you are becoming.

Make the water hot, so you feel it, but not too hot. You are still trying to keep physical pain at bay. Step in and notice how the water’s spray feels on your skin. Feel a moment’s pleasure. Feel guilty.

Soap your hair with lavender shampoo. Hope it calms the column of despair between your womb and the hollow in your throat. Wash your swollen breasts gently. Wonder if they’ve realized they can stop making milk. Decide they have. Change your mind. Linger on the small curve of your stomach as you lather. Wonder why its stillness didn’t occur to you before.

Make a mental list of things to do: clip your six-year-old’s fingernails; clip your own; call your best friend. She doesn’t know yet. You are afraid to call her because the membrane is thin with her. But she will understand the mix of grief, anger, confusion, relief, and guilt. Feel grateful for your fortune in friends. Feel ashamed that you haven’t called yet.

Rub soap on your limbs. Hope you can rub away the film of fear, the dust of grief. Wash the shadowed spot between your legs. Soon someone will have to reach in and take death out. Consider the irony of being able to birth both life and death. 

Remember, as a teenager, seeing the carved stone Sheela-na-Gig in the National Museum of Ireland. Recall your disgust at her ugliness, the rudeness of her gestures—open mouth to take in, open vagina to push out. Soak in the discomfort of unwanted understanding.

Flash back to yesterday, the 18-week ultrasound. Feel your husband and daughter huddled around the table, excitement and hope rising from your skin like steam. Six years since you were there before, giddy, with just your husband. Remember your living child saying, “I hope the baby doesn’t decide to die,” then your own twinge of intuition. Wonder whether telling her about the possibility was smart. Remember the screen, the absence of sound, movement. Remember the face of the technician, the doctor, the woman at the front desk. Let the moment of knowing wash over you. Lean your arm against the shower wall and allow yourself to weep.

Lather your face, while gravity pulls at you. Wash the tears away. Feel the words bubbling up in you, begging to be born. Wonder how it is that you can choose to pour words and not blood. Feel the burn of fear. Imagine the blood, red and hot, pouring into the water at your feet. Rinse the soap away and turn off the water.

Take a deep breath. Step out. Wrap yourself in numbness. Pump cocoa butter into your hands and spread it over your aching breasts and quiet belly. Wonder if your body will still bear the marks of pregnancy. Berate yourself for your vanity.

Pull on your clothes quickly, covering as much skin as you can. Know the sense of protection is a placebo. See yourself in the mirror and immediately look away. The reflection does not tell the story. Shake your head at the inadequacies of sight, of language.

Think about the dark and borderless space inside you. Absorb your lack of control. Feel the tears well again. This time, don’t let them spill. Instead, tell yourself you can replace sadness with anger. Tell yourself you are made of stone. Tell yourself you were made for this. Turn toward the world, taking in, pushing out.

---

Header photograph by Jen Ippensen
Header artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

We are slow to leave the house. Slow on our bikes along the crowded, weekend river, slow until the path swings out into fields beyond the city. It is late October, a few days past the autumn peak, a few days before the clocks roll back, but the fields here are still rich green and umber, the sky a rare, ceramic blue. Crows flock and peck in fresh-plowed dirt, cackling at their luck. Above, red kites circle, wings barely moving, carried on rising columns of warmth.

It’s my first ride since the accident. I’d been going slow then too, hit a dusty curb, lost purchase on the cobbles. Now, the muscle in my left thigh tremors, a trough still carved where I landed on the bicycle’s metal frame. The mark of my own weight.

The bridge, when we reach it, looks like nothing special—just a steel crisscross of girders and beams. But then we push up to the top, and a liquid causeway unspools: over half a mile of water lifted towards the sky, surrounded and filled with the blue of it, a mirror world rippled only by the chevron wakes of boats. They might as well be ghost ships, dream ships, sailing by so slowly, almost soundlessly at the height of treetops that shatter the last of their golden crowns into the air.

This place—the sudden beauty of it—feels less like landscape and more like force or motion, pulling us into itself. We ride along the aqueduct’s edge, and everything becomes water, wind, sky. Weight dissolves with each pump of our legs, gravity displaced by a momentum of wheels, a proximity of cloud.

At the end of the path, we park our bikes and climb the stairs of a tower to watch the boats leave the water bridge and enter the river. Others already gathered there make space at the railing, all of us speaking half in, half out of our first languages. A faded placard reminds us that this bridge, this flowing link between Berlin and the Rhine, was almost left unfinished, its early construction suspended for decades until the east and west halves of this land were patched back together again.

Mere months from now, my arm will unravel without warning—a snarl of nerve fiber thrumming under the skin. My body will knit and fray, knit and fray, over and over until I grow stronger once more. Meanwhile, you will lift my bike down the stairs so I can ride, and I will do the same for you when, years later, you snag a wheel in a tramline and crack your shoulder blade. Like bends in a stream, we take turns. Each carrying what we can for the other.

Below us, boats enter the lock. Slowly, each boat sinks down and down as water pumps out, a smell of muck and weed rising up until, just when it seems that there is no more depth to contain it, the boat skims the level of the river and drifts free. All around the tower, there are sighs and shutter clicks as boat after boat glides and dwindles away. We keep watching even after they vanish, as if out of superstition, as if to make a wish. As if we are all wishing for that same permission to sink, safe in the knowledge that the current beneath will bear us up. Or else, we are wishing to somehow hold all of this, with all of its weight, even as we let it go.

At last, we climb back down and onto our bikes. Over the fields, evening unfurls a wave of rust. The crows settle among the trees, condensing into dark silhouettes. Where the path widens, we ride side by side, slow enough to take each curve in time. The world streams past, and we stream through it, tenuous and yet tethered, as spider silk tight-roped from grass blade to grass blade catches the setting sun like telephone wire, thread after thread of floating light strung along the water’s course, rivering us all the way home.

---

Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

1. You will get arrested for the first time, under the disdainful eye of the Victoria’s Secret regional manager. Upon seeing you chained to the front of the store chanting about trees, she will sigh, roll her eyes, and say, “Oh, it’s you,” crossing her arms over her smart black blazer.
   
   
2. But first, you will teach others on your dorm floor how to do laundry. How to separate the loads—what needs cold water and what wants hot. How to measure and where to pour the soap. How to remove clothes from the dryer right away, warm. How to hold them to your face and breathe, though that isn’t part of doing laundry. But isn’t it?
   
   
3. You will navigate public transit home from the Castro on Halloween while rolling on MDMA with your friend, all wigs and shouting. You will learn to find your way using the hills and the stars as guides, even though they double themselves as you hold yourself against a lamppost. You will know that sometimes shame smells like coconut rum.
   
   
4. You will let Eva Hesse save your soul more than once. You will come to understand that bell hooks and Angela Davis have the answer for everything. You will let Fiona Apple and Tracy Chapman rock you to sleep. You will have your fake ID confiscated at the Yeah Yeah Yeahs show at Great American Music Hall, but you will not hold that against them. You will discover that you are more of a Brontë sisters person than a Jane Austen person, which is saying a lot.
   
   
5. You will smoke clove cigarettes under the neon signs in the Mission, the smoke curling into a vision of your future like a horoscope, while you wait for the bus on an inappropriate street corner, electricity crackling overhead.
   
   
6. You will stare down the man in workshop who describes the poem about your grandmother’s death as being “not credible.” Your face will grow hot, its own incredulity. In that moment, you will grow up and resolve to be more choosy about the people you fuck. You will struggle to imagine the future: that you will find a life that is everything you could possibly want.
   
   
7. You will feel tempted to become a religion major, a pull that will make no sense to you as an agnostic. The only gods you have known have been horses and the sound of their hooves splashing through creeks.
   
   
8. You will feel kinship with your elderly Irish Catholic World Religion professor, and will be drawn in by his warmth, a grandfather free from disdain, the grandfather you did not have.
   
   
9. It will make no logical sense to you, until you discover that you are the Buddhist you will write term papers about. You will practice the bliss of sitting in silence, watching the breath that breathes you. You will embrace the agony of aching knees as you watch your spinning, obsessive thoughts and try not to hate them. You will learn that your love of trees and the moon is not merely an exercise as a poet, not only something to digest and regurgitate for workshop.
   
   
10. You will discover that everything is holy. This will happen, too.

---

Header photograph by Linds Sanders
Header artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

It’s all computer screens and cables crammed on a gray desk that’s built into the wall. It’s drawers filled with crumpled up rough drafts and quizzes. It’s drawings in faded pen and scribbled notes your friends cared enough to mail, taped on each corner and stuck to the wall. 

It’s passing an acquaintance from high school as she lies in the field on the edge of campus and fiddles with her hair. It’s exchanging hellos before hurrying to class. 

It’s sticky note to-do lists and checked-off assignments, fluorescent lights staying on until you finish the book you should’ve read over the weekend. It’s late nights perched in your office chair—white noise and headphones drowning out screaming tinnitus.

It’s all road trips back home and potlucks. It’s waiting for the uncle who smells like cigarettes to arrive on Thanksgiving. It’s small-town Idaho gatherings at The Pond, where sixty percent of attendees have the same nose you do sticking out an inch from their faces. It’s fireworks that break a laundry list of laws crackling into the night until the sheriff shows and demands Whose property is this? despite knowing it’s his cousin’s. It’s battered cans of beer you turn down even though you’ve been twenty-one since August. 

It’s pouring yourself a gin and tonic and curling up in the stiff chair by the window of your friend’s cabin to watch the rain.

It’s all friends you should write back to but never do.

It’s all thrift stores and tacky pants. It’s a shirt with frills on the front you’re holding up in the mirror. Your shoulders are too broad to wear it, and your chest too flat. Your friends all say it looks cute. It’s three a.m. tea parties in the living room of your dorm. A place you decorated with six-dollar paintings of a girl in a blue dress feeding ducks in a park, and one of a hunting dog posed on a rock—all purchased to make up for the shirt you didn’t buy. 

It’s daily texts from your anxious mom.

Motorcycles roaring you from sleep at four in the morning.

The box of old clothes left on the stairs labeled “FREE.”

---

Header photograph by Linds Sanders
Header artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

You move into the neighborhood and now all we hear are clown horns and foot slaps. Go-karts race down Yale Avenue, hit chuckholes and spit you up against concrete curbs. Just when we think we have you all counted, you multiply. Ragamuffins, Dad calls you. We think that’s your last name until our oldest brother, Eddie, yells out—Hey Ragamuffins!—from his GTO, and now you glare at him with cap-gun eyes.

You come over to play with us. We can’t help but stare at the scabs you have for kneecaps, your scarecrow hair. You are our fascination and you know it. 

Where’s the creek? you ask, and you lead us there even though this is supposed to be our neighborhood. We are not allowed to go as far as Darby Creek without permission, but you herd us—the seven or nine or more of you—your soiled limbs waving in the August sun. 

Darby Creek is a letdown. Can’t even float a stick in it! you scream, and then you are a pack of soldiers—you smear mud on your faces and whoop war cries across the water. Your troop plans its attack on ours. Get the Charlies! You crest the bank and splash through the creek, sticks raised like swords.

We stand frozen on the grass and observe you as if we’re watching the NBC nightly news broadcast from Vietnam. Eddie’s scared of Vietnam. You don’t know about his low lottery number; how Dad looked like a sponge cake when the draft man on TV pulled number 26 from the plastic capsule. You don’t see us sitting around the dinner table every night watching soldiers in the thick jungle, choppers landing on dirt pads. You don’t hear how we can barely breathe as our nightmare unfolds halfway across the world on the tiny screen of our tea cart television. You don’t notice our camouflaged tears. Instead, you point sticks at our heads.

Fight! Coward! You bang your chests as if there are centipedes trapped inside of your ratty tees. 

We want to protest, but we know it won’t matter. You crave bloodshed. You skip over lumpy rocks in Darby Creek, bodies of the dead and missing. You approach; we feel the warmth roll down our legs. Your crooked teeth grin wide as you trip us, grind pinkies into our Good-Humor-truck bellies. We watch as our choker beads spill into the clover. We pray for Darby Creek to grow angry, leap the bank, wash you back to where you came from, though we have better things to pray for in 1972, and then the dinner bell rings and you surrender your weapons. 

We retreat to the kitchen table. NBC’s cameras fly over mangroves and rice patties; we want to tell Eddie we survived the war of the Ragamuffins, but men are face down in the waterlogged field and somehow that seems more important. Mom spies the creek mud underneath our fingernails, and we are sent to the bathroom sink to scrub and scrub. 

Back at the kitchen table, Eddie’s gone and no one’s talking. The newscaster flatly lists Vietnam’s daily count—37 dead, 81 missing—almost as if he’s reporting sports scores. Dad reaches over, switches off the TV. Finish your dinner, Mom commands, and we don’t dare mention the hunk of steak and full mountain of mashed potatoes still on Eddie’s plate. We slide green beans into our mouths, but they are cold, slimy water moccasins. 

Outside, wheels rumble and scrape across pavement. We imagine sparks flinging down Yale Avenue, your helmetless heads free and loose, hands and feet stretched outside your go-karts, tongues flapping. We chew cold steak while listening to your wild shouts and laughter, the roar of your escape.

---

Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

The lights are out in the cabin where the boys and I sleep, but I’m not there. I’m awake in the backseat of a truck with a sleeping Mason whose face is smushed against the window.

“No favorites,” my boss commanded us during orientation, but Mason crafts ketchup art on his dinner plate, writes his own murder-mystery book series, and likes Schitt’s Creek as much as I do. 

The driver flies down the two-lane road. I swallow a shout whenever a deer appears by the shoulder, not wanting to wake Mason without cause. I tell myself that if we hit a deer, he’ll wake up anyway. I remember the story my dad told me, how he totaled his Jeep before I was born.

“The deer came out of nowhere, and I couldn’t turn fast enough. I tried.”

At the hospital, a man asks the woman behind the desk to let him in the back to see a patient. “It was my fault,” he says. “I need to tell him.” She sends him away. Our turn.

“My stomach hurts,” Mason tells her. He tells her that it hurts less than it did an hour or so before. Our driver, an actual adult with copies of Mason’s insurance and a credit card, explains that the doctor at camp thought it might be appendicitis. I am the twenty-year-old counselor who was told to go with his camper to the hospital. I stand behind them both, useless.

In the waiting area, I’m on my phone. Mason asks if I’m texting my girlfriend. I laugh and don’t answer him, too embarrassed to tell a middle schooler that I’ve never even been on a date. Not counting prom when I took my sister’s friend. Mom was fussing with my tux while Dad instructed me, “Be sure to give her all your attention tonight. It’s her only prom.”

We get called into an exam room. A woman in scrubs sits at a desk littered with empty yogurt containers and blank forms. She asks Mason questions. “It doesn’t really hurt anymore,” Mason says. The driver huffs and rolls his eyes. The nurse says we should still run a test to be safe. Mason pees in a cup. Back to the waiting room. 

At the vending machine, Mason makes fun of how many snacks I buy. I get him a Musketeers Bar, one of my dad’s favorites. We avoid the driver, he’s kind of weird. I look up “Would You Rather…” questions on my phone.

“Would you rather be in jail for five years or a coma for a decade?”

“Coma, definitely.”

“But you lose ten years of your life!”

Mason shrugs.

They call us back to a different room. There’s a bed for Mason and one chair. The driver is kind enough to sit on the floor. It’s three in the morning. “We need a blood sample,” the nurse says and Mason starts to shake. He’s never given blood. I put my hand on his shoulder as the needle slips into his skin. 

I remember when my dad drove me to the hospital to have blood work done.

“You don’t have to look at the needle. You can if you want, but you don’t have to.” We stopped at Hardee’s for biscuits after. 

The nurse pulls the needle out of Mason’s arm. His body calms. More waiting. 

A doctor enters. They need a CT scan. If he has appendicitis, he will need surgery. Mason’s never had surgery. He lies back on his hospital bed and starts to shake again. 

I pull out my phone and tell him he can watch Netflix. He takes it and sees my lock screen. A man is sitting on a couch wearing an LSU baseball cap, wrapping paper at his side, but the gift is out of frame. The man is grinning. 

“Who is that?” Mason asks.

I don’t know how to tell him it’s a picture of my father. My father who I am named after. My father who drove me to swim meets and bought me ice cream whether I won or lost, who taught me to drive, who watched Seinfeld with me, who came to all my school plays and pretended to like even the bad ones, who said “I love you” every morning before school. My forty-six-year-old father who was in good health when he lay down on an operating table and bled out within an hour only a year ago. 

I know I can’t tell Mason that. There is no reason to tell Mason that. The doctor will wake us up around six the next morning to say that the CT shows it is indeed appendicitis and that the surgery has to be today, and Mason will go in for the operation and come out just fine.

Mason’s parents will come down for his three-day recovery before he returns to camp. I’ll shake his father’s hand and tell him that his son is my favorite in the cabin. Mason will return to camp and see his friends and go swimming and walk on the beach and play basketball and read with a flashlight and leave camp and go back to school and grow up and go to college and get married and have children and see them grow up and he won’t die before they have a chance to say goodbye.

Mason is not my father. Mason is different because Mason is just like everyone else.

I stare at the screen, unable to return my father’s smile. “It’s my dad,” I say.

Mason nods. He turns on Schitt’s Creek, and without looking at me, tilts the phone so I can watch too.

---

Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

You covered yourself in kerosine. Grabbed a box of matches. Took one out. Even as a child I saw through the act, knew it wasn’t a real threat, just an immature cry for attention. Another way to breed fear in all of us. One more way to get our mother to look at you and not us, to pick you over us. Beg for your life over her own no matter how many times you’d tried to take it. That night included. She got on her knees in front of you and I had the urge to take the match from your hand, light it and let it ignite against your skin. Even if it killed us all. So long as my mother’s suffering would stop. So long as she was off her knees, and you were the one screaming in pain for once, begging for your life for once. So long as the fire allowed my mother to feel the warmth she never got from your touch.

---

Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

Your five-year-old daughter looks up at you with wet eyes and says, “I don’t think she wants to be my friend anymore.” Your stomach falls down an elevator shaft, and suddenly you are 11.

You are 11, and the girl who was your best friend meets you in the alley to walk to school together. “Don’t ever do your hair like that again,” she stabs at you as she walks ahead. The whole way to school you slowly untwirl the coils and braids you woke up extra early to put in. You are stunned and now your hair really does look ridiculous, with a mind of its own since you’ve forced it into and out of plaits. The whole day is spent trying to hide your shameful hair.

One day, you go to sit down with the girls who were your friends and the entire group gets up and moves to a new table, leaving you alone to stare at your lunch. But you did your hair right. Right?

The 11-year-olds are progressing, recruiting some of the older girls. They start following you home from school every day, hurling insults but never getting close enough to push you over. They say things like, “Look at me when I’m talking to you.” And when you don’t look, they throw gravel at your back. Sometimes a stick. But you don’t turn around and you don’t run, either. Somehow, you know to keep your eyes down, your steps measured, your mouth shut.

You start getting stomach pains so you don’t have to go to school. It goes on so long, you are taken to the doctor. The doctor examines you, looks at your mother and says, “There’s nothing wrong with her.” And you almost cry because: (1) You have been found out, and (2) This is the nicest thing anyone has said to you in a while.

The 11-year-old girls must be bored, because they call your house. As you twist the long rotary phone cord over and over your wrist, they take turns hissing into the receiver:

“Bitch.”

“Loser.”

“Scaredy-cat.”

“Pussy, come back to school.”

And now you must, as your stomach is fine.

“Who was that?”

“Nobody, just some friends.”

One day, rather than insults and gravel, the girls throw pieces of bread at you. “Chicken legs!” they call out, in a way to make you know this is a bad thing. “Hey, chicken legs, have some chicken food!” they shout, making bok-bok-bok noises and laughing. You think: (1) Chickens don’t eat bread, do they? (2) Wow, this took some forethought, and (3) Why is even the shape of my body wrong, a personal affront, something I am supposed to control somehow?

And then you look at your daughter’s damp blue eyes, little pools now, needing to say something. Social media tells you the 11-year-old girls are now also grown, with their own daughters. What do they say to their little girls? The right things, most likely. Some wisdom you don’t have access to. Here you are, failing again.

You cannot say, “She still wants to be your friend.” You cannot say,  “Everything will be okay.” You want to say: (1) Harden your heart into stone, or (2) Practice staring into the middle distance. Be still, so still and so quiet, so as not to be detected. Or, (3) Start making art so you can have an endless conversation with yourself.

You bend your chicken legs at the knees, hoist up your tiny daughter. You press her chest to your own stone heart, and say nothing.

---

Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

I thought of you when she turned to me with those pleading desperate eyes and begged for us to go away somewhere. I knew from the way she spoke that she’d go anywhere I wanted. It came as no surprise that she agreed to Pittsburg. 

When she and I lived together, she used to do this thing where she’d climb into my bed when the lights were out and we were alone and she’d tell me that she didn’t like girls but she liked me. And my skin would get hot and she’d giggle at how I’d blush. She’d tease me for my goosebumps that popped up whenever our hands touched. But when the lights came on, she’d act completely different. She’d tell her friends I was the one to flirt with her. 

But then she moved out. Now whenever we see each other, she hangs off my arm in public and follows after me. I think she got lonely. She reminds me of how I was with you. Just more obvious. 

You never knew I loved you, did you? I can’t blame you. It’s my way I guess. I’m not one to seize opportunities when they present themselves. I tend to let that opportunity pack up and move hours away and find other people who love them. 

“The University of Pittsburgh?” She asked after I typed the directions in. She sounded skeptical but turned when the phone told her to. 

“It has beautiful architecture.” I replied, staring out the window. 

“Really?” 

“Yeah.” 

To be honest I didn’t know if it was true or not, I just needed a reason, an excuse, and she would have taken any. 

“Well then,” She smiled at me, “I can’t wait to see it.” 

I couldn’t help but think about how sweet she looked. 

She had this habit—a favorite hobby of hers— of leading me on time and time again. To be fair, I let her. I knew her tricks, the little traps she set. I stepped into them willfully. I never brushed her hand away when it found its way onto my knee. And I always let myself melt into her hands when they cradled my face or traced patterns into my skin. It felt nice to have someone flatter me and touch me the way she did, even if I knew it didn’t mean anything to her. 

She made me feel the way I felt when I was younger and you were still around. How willing I was to fall in love. 

Do you know what I thought about when I started to fall for her?

I thought about how much I missed you. And, suddenly, I felt so overwhelmed with how far away you were. I wanted to see you when I loved her. I wanted you to stop it. 

I thought I might find you at the University of Pittsburgh. I remember when you told me you were accepted there.

She draped herself over my arm and told people who didn’t ask that I was her girlfriend. She looked to the sky, admiring the excuses I’d made—the buildings, the bridges—while I searched the crowds of students and cars that rolled by. She held my hand and rested her head on my shoulder, and I was embarrassed—embarrassed of what you might think if my eyes ever did find yours in the swarm of people. She whispered in my ear, trying to coax a blush to my cheeks. 

I could hardly hear her. I could have sworn I heard your voice everywhere. 

I searched the museums and greens and sidewalks. I examined every face. I stayed until it was dark. And still, I couldn’t find you. Her hand tightened around mine. She smelled nice. I knew when we went back to the hotel she’d kiss my cheek and watch my skin redden and I’d think of you and I’d think that I was in over my head.

Being in love with her feels like falling out of love with you. And then I’m mourning you all over again. Losing you all over again. You promised me better things when you went away. But there I stood, in Pittsburg, and all I could think was that my better things had been with you.

---

Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

Your body grows and grows. You somehow get the foreign thing out, the thing that is yours and also, where did it come from?

There’s no way to know until it’s too late.

They tell you it’s hard. They say you don’t know until it happens to you. I’m telling you because no one else will. The truth is that they need need need need need. It’s relentlessness, the need. I wasn’t prepared.

They say it will change your life. What they mean is you will never be the same. Fucking hell. They don’t tell you the whole truth. And why would they? They’re drowning. They’re sad all the time. They’re nothing, they’re ghosts.

Do you remember the person you were? Being responsible for only your own body, your own breath? One night stands, sweating lovers, slipping away in the night?

I see a ledge, steep rocks on a cliff and dizziness looking down. I wonder about slipping. How would it feel, free? Like love rushing up to meet me?

I am here to tell you that when I wake up I die, and I put on a perfect mother mask, and I fetch breakfast and socks and backpacks, and cheery-eyed I send them to school. Need need need need need. I wake up and die and I make lunch, run the vacuum, click out a grocery order, zombie-drive to the lot, find a spot, park between lines, and wait for someone to bring it out. Thanks so much. Do you have any paper coupons? I have slips of paper but they don’t save me anything. Paper can’t save me now.

What no one tells you is that you’ll dream about death like a lover, dream of the escape, of the nothingness, the quiet mouth of an empty grave. How peaceful to feel the dirt shoveled on. Oh praise! Oh, warm heavy earth blanket! How wholesome to think of worms and maggots and fungi singing through your flesh.

I wake up and die and remember it’s trash day recycling day picture day field trip day farmers’ market day birthday Saturday. Need need need need need. I wake up and die knowing need is constant and collapsing us all into two dimensions, need is dragging me down to the dirt and putting her mouth on my mouth.

If anyone told me, would I have understood?

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Header photograph by Deborah Hughes
Header artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson