He did not know the train from its whistle. But who did anymore? Everyone blamed the economy for everything: terraces pocked with animal tracks, a series of refrigerator failings, tornado warnings dispatched to the wrong counties. I’d like to airlock you, he said to her. But you’re better for burning. But he didn’t say it, of course. He was talking to himself. At the gallery on the night they met, the painter took the knife, smeared it across the horizon. All the other people there were salt and chert: celebrity weddings; ladders and mattresses. And every morning now the raw husk of sex pulls through the trees like a swallow finding his home. But if we fucked the au pair, she told him as they stared at three panels in black-and-white, our names would change at midnight. The next morning: a white bird hovered in the neighbor’s kitchen. He whistled, and it whistled back. The coffee pot sputtered a row of dazzling notes. Even the streetlights couldn’t help themselves. Like lamps in the desert.
Jay Robinson
www.barnowlreview.com
O Holy Insurgency
Mary Biddinger