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damned, doomed, boneless. i'm a fish out of water. i mean, i'm a goldfish in the bathtub. have you seen my family? dreaming fish-dreams of glittery shoals, swooping the sea like a net of jewels, you're a gem. this one said. your tail all a glimmer, angling an arrow, pointing half of you in different directions at the same time. but it's not like that. there are too many of us. moving. we bump up against each other and off our edges like moths trapped inside of a lampshade. wolfing at artificial light, when the moon is high in the sky, hidden by shadowing buildings, windows to everyone else's inside. i'm trying to stop seeing. i'm trying to howl in private. i'm trying a dream to leap canyons back, back to the rain where i came from. wearing the open sky for a hat, what with stars and clouds and wings and all.
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my favorite documentaries are about animals or big-hearted farmers. this means that. one day, i'll be envoy extraordinary of my own living document. milkweed and bolted, dandelion stuck in the staples, between the nibbling teeth of the pages. here's the picture: slice of land nestled in a hillside. apples to everywhere. tin buckets bent, strapped, sweet on their trees, mutually enamored. one pig, one cow, one chicken. we'll farm apples and maple sugar. i'll name the pig Henry and give him all my sweet scraps of pepper-stem and rhubarb. apple core galore. he'll snort, blush, wild rose-petals pressed, stuck as a scented mosaic for his snout. for the others, the grass in this place is glistered with chlorophyll, quiet worms working, happy and blind, dirt-nibble, what comes from the ground there, clean and sweet, what's buried there is old. i come from that ground, i'm sure of it, twisted from its tree trunks and the winding roots of bittersweet. cumulous, bluejay, milky way, where. the rain is soft and holds the sky up.
what sort of name will you give your chicken? if you were a chicken, which would you choose?
Princess Pansy Lavender
Gooseberry Woods
Gertrude Stein. Venus De Milo. Queen Elizabeth?
Lulu!
|ˈloōˌloō| noun
1. an outstanding example of a particular type of person or thing, a person or thing remarkable or wonderful. 2. a Samoan barn owl.
is a chicken a person or a thing? if a chicken is a thing, a person is a thing. or if a chicken is not a thing, a chicken will have to be a person. we'll wear spectacles and read from the dictionary. we'll make pancakes on sundays, and eat them in our pajamas. we'll go out dancing and come home late and laughing. lightening bugs will speckle the base of the tree line, at the edge of the pasture, miming a million stars. the cow will be asleep standing up, giant orb-eyed like dreaming planets, long eyelashes like an antique fringe frames a wet window. i'll smooth his velveteen ears and tell him a secret, the rain will start barely, bounce off the barn roof like a snow of stardust, i'll name him Sweet William, after a wildflower.
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