on a flaming pie

“These days I work the garden—pulling up the old, turning the soil for the new. This keeps my ghost in prosperity—a bright exhaustion; bright yet unsensational. Parsley & tomatoes & peppers to inquire into the silence that inquires into me. I imagine I’ll love people again, eventually. But not today—& not up close.”

“Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.”