I wasn’t sorrowful watching the runs in the window stocking
from the silly rain that kept pounding from dawn to dusk, and
as the clouds ran away from me, to be replaced by more, darker,
lifeless bigger brothers that frowned at me. The night before,
the day before, the week before had taken it all out of me, and
left me a husk of pliable features, ones that could be picked
up with coat hangars or marionette strings or tongue depressors,
and moved into comical or fearsome masks. But the dancing hands
whose inelegant incarnation I seemed to be were on break, holding
a coffee cup or twisting a piece of brown hair absent-mindedly
in a deceptively-gendered non-chalance, their own puppeteer staring
at the bikini calendar on the wall of the employee lounge, then
realizing he looks like a pervert, and looking away.
The sun came out the next morning after my uneasy sleep, the
whole fiery thing had passed in the night, as it usually does,
and things were pungent and wet—the smell dandelion milk
all over my nostrils, sour and rich, and streaks of mud were on
the edges of the concrete steps where people scraped their shoes
before going into their apartments. The frizz of the overhead
wires tunneling the sky towards the other end of the line ratcheted
the animals into a state of confused directionless agitation,
and me too. No other choice, we ran with the telephone clicks
and whines in the aura expanded by the humidity and followed those
phone calls forever, forever, forever.
