WILD ANIMAL

for Caitlin

I was brought quickly and gently to consciousness when you changed in the morning. It was like being in the room with a wild animal. I gripped my eyes tightly shut and held my body stiller than it had probably been in sleep. You're the gray wolf: an apex predator; and I'm a boy with googly eyes penned onto my hand. I was in the presence of greatness. But as much pride as I felt for my proximity, so did I fear the primal wrath that your clenched canines and glared focus might deliver. So I steadied my breathing and I waited for the distant clink of a cereal bowl before wandering out from the blanketed cave and into the world.

These days

These days, empty of momentum, I am filling myself with stories. The details, digested, stitch together like tissue, and I feel muscular enough to carry things again.

BE PROUD

Short things

I am making a study of short stories, short sentences, short men and shorts. They share a quality. Beside shortness, that is. It is that quality of which I am making a study. But the shortness helps, I think.

WILTING A ROSE

There's a whole craft that goes into wilting a rose. There's an entire league of rules and procedures that guide the browning, the drooping, the hardening. Without this order, a rose might go on flowering well past its expiration date. The petals could remain red far beyond the point that they'd all bent to the thumbs of passersby and been sucked dry by bee and hopeful nose alike. Maybe we'd all own giant vases full of ancient roses. Instead, they die, and the floor of my apartment becomes crunchy when the breeze pulls forgotten petals from their stiff stems and lands them in my foot's path.

Corollary

When I am hungry, I become afraid. Today, I woke up frightened, and so starved myself.

THOSE JAGGED K9s