Some Whole Wheat Words

I kind of always wished that if you put enough of your emotion into the details the story would just tell itself.

There’s a white deck chair at the back of our backyard I like to think of as Dad’s Chair. It’s almost lost under the thick staghorn sumac that grew up in a cretaceous pallisade last summer, when we were first taking care of him and forgot to mow them. They’re like trees now. Sometimes I’m washing dishes in the evening and I let go of a plate, and as it sinks down into the basin I look out of the window past my reflection and imagine him sitting out there under all that green. Soap dries on my skin and the plate hits the bottom of the sink. I mow regularly now.

Egg Boy is my superhero alternate self. I came up with him as I walked back home through Chinatown after seeing a movie. He is perfectly self-contained inside of an energy field, which protects him from harm. His iron will allows him to focus on a single task unbendingly without becoming distracted. And his sunny centre keeps him happy even when nobody is around. He is complete inside his energy field, a unit separate from all others. He ate some eggs benny from Futures made with irradiated eggs.

Wrote this for Jen back when she was:

When I’m away
and bent into the sofa
listening to the oxygen machine
groan in rhythm
like ropes across the deck
of the ship of my father,
I look out
over
that vast river he’s crossing
I feel the chill on my feet
and feel the pull
of the neptunian velvet
and I begin to sink
into the cracks in the cushions
and the plaster ceiling crashes
in moving waves above me
like foam on the surface
I come unmoored and drift
but you are my strong bronze anchor
with sandy feet
and you stand where the water is warm
and the sun fills it like flaming copper
and the fish are gilded swarms
and you pull me back
link by link
from the rocks