F Daniel Rzicznek

Skinned a knuckle getting the sparkplug loose from the mower. The afternoon was a boat in the breeze, the grass unbelievably tall for March, neighbors gesturing and gesturing like microwaved daffodils. I’m no better getting a too-close look at a young hawk in what’s left of the towering elm out back. The sun and wind send tears into play but the high, half-dead limb in the bird’s grasp—it’s hard to properly imagine the bones of the situation. It fractals across history and morals and ruins our curtains. A cloud rose up in the shape of a chainsaw. A dog at the end of the lead led me. A stamp in red across the brow reading DISCARD. Like orchestras raiding one another’s band shells, two desires in the mind turn me dizzy in circles of smoke and summer fume. It’s always hanging around the yard, just above the blades. A thousand cities out there. One of us keeps turning the lights on. Sometimes the lights turn themselves off. Could be ten thousand cities. Down in some hollow, the sound could be a man turning furniture into wreckage. But the sound, poetic and unfathomable, is our government turning men into the night sky.

Dear Amanda: if you did not overwhelm me, I would be worried. When we unknot the line, we find it tangled again. The interior arrives with interest due—a tax that flows from second story sanctuary to the television’s halo of family drool. If we had a second story, we would sequester ourselves there in anticipation. Instead, always at the edge of things, we gaze down and find Earth itself within reach: fog over snow, ice over current, cloud over cloud, mood over money. When I thought I’d lost my wedding ring today, my breath left first. An ocean of what cut me at the knees, washed my bones green, and it was all I could do to call out. When we return from even the briefest inattention, the line is perfect, as if braided by a holy, alien hand. Mock laughter is the best kind. Skin is a cloth. Sight is a series of luminous sounds. The deer we saw were bedded down— indifferent, used to humans and dogs on the path. The goose that cried had been wounded. How we wanted to claim him, devour him. We work to forget the line, but not its use. To feel the pull. To not move the eye toward it, yet believe.