Few Exceptions
Unaccustomed to my vacant life, I come slowly
untethered
as if treading on birds. We are imperfect
instruments—I make up my mind
to read Ulysses out of spite, again,
and pay to spend time in a greenhouse,
ironically.
Under its ribs, which push
into the sky,
the mist falls across my face, hissing.
The fronds of an overgrown cabbage
cup my head from above,
as though blessing me. I type
worst dildo??? with an image
of a tumescent cactus. We are imperfect
instruments
of one another’s desire. At the pond
a child
stands beside me. We gaze at the small koi
and the stupidness of their moving
faces,
protruding eyes. The child says
to his vacant mother,
living out her own unexpectedly
vacant life,
je voudrais une grande feuille,
which to me, so recently
blessed,
is all the more profound
because French is the language
of unapologetic aristocracy, condescension,
and my immense personal laziness. I am a sprinter,
intellectually speaking, and language
acquisition requires
a commitment to the throughline.
Somewhere in the fracturing past,
my father takes me to the pet store
in the woods. There are few exceptions
to what can be found in the woods
near the ocean, or by
the airport in my hometown. The pet store has miniature
ponies.
If you are reading this, you are a person,
who was once a child
so you can imagine
my delight.
A foal is born, the hair of its forehead grows
long
in the yellow spiral of a sun. When my rabbits die
my father gets fish and we return
often to the pet store, at a loss
of what else to do with one another.
We spontaneously choose a beautiful fish.
It is a fighting fish
and it takes chunks out of the guppies
and ingests
their tiny, accidental babies.
It is around this time that my memory
splinters.
It is possible that we allow the fighting fish
to continue to consume
its compatriots, drifting alone
through the emptying water
until long after
my father’s death. Equally possible that we
exile him
and that the other fish
die
from quieter neglect.
Does the trajectory matter when the outcome
is the same.
What I recall with certainty
is that the fighting fish survives.
It lives
in my friend’s front room, where the sunlight
turns its tail fins
into a stained glass window.
Also published in “Mud Season Review”