Ten.Four
1. How I wonder why I'm awake so early, at the first light, before the alarm. Before I'm fully rested.
2. I watch the videos I took on my phone of last night's fireworks, remembering the time we stopped in Arcola, Illinois and stood in the Dairy Queen parking lot, bones vibrating and ears ringing from the booms.
3. The sparrow is back again. Flying in frightened circles again. This must be a sign.
4. The sway of the tall grass on the berm.
5. My inability to make a conclusion is frustrating.
6. Circles.
7. The struggle to articulate the fullness of the situation.
8. We say the same things over and over.
9. Why are we here again, doing this again, saying this again, wishing for this again?
10. I watch myself stand outside the loop.
Ten.Three
1. Train horns at 5:33 a.m. Long and drawn out.
2. How many different way can I describe the density of air? It is milky, thick, heavy, syrupy, sticky, unmoving.
3. Mam and baby dear: the way they both turn toward me when I slide open the door, heads up, ears perked before they resume grazing.
4. Cigarette smoke: the way it lingers long after the last drag.
5. Wet grass.
6. The collapse into cool, white sheets.
7. The way writing on this piece of hotel stationery evokes the smell of bergamot and lavender and rain.
8. Sawdust. Varnish. The sound of the power washer against thin metal.
9. The thinness of the air.
10. Smears of black ink.
Ten.Two
1. The fog rising off the tall grass is thick and orange-hued.
2. Why is it that we scrub ourselves clean beyond recognition? Who do we think we are fooling?
3. The coffee tastes bitter and burnt but I drink it anyway because this is ritual and sometimes we forsake soul-sense in devotion of habit.
4. Milky air.
5. I am not breathing.
6. I hold my breath too much.
7. The way he is more himself when we are alone: head tilted, limbs so long and lean and folded over.
8. My skin is damp. Dewey. I am my own ecosystem.
9. There is a car up ahead whose taillights look like sirens. How the sight of what might be sirens makes me hold my breath.
10. I hold my breath too much.
Ten.One
1. A little black sparrow flew in frightened circles in front of the alcove this morning.
2. It's been 4 weeks since he last saw the barber and now the hairs, golden and brown, are curling around his temples and along his forehead.
3. The way his hands move in front of him when he beings to talk. It's one of the reasons I love him: His passion is never as quiet and unassuming as mine.
4. What is it? That sound of blade against wood? Rhythmic thuds.
5. A reflection of myself: shoulders curved too far forward and a neck bent to an unnatural degree. I am leaning into myself. Or am I curling away from someone or something?
6. The angles of light in this house and the way we walk in and out of the shadows.
7. There are not enough trees on our property to break up the wind and the small green leaves of the pepper plant whip back and forth.
8. Tenderness in the breast. First the left and now the right, and how I think about the cancer in my grandmother and my aunt and how I try to always convince myself that this tenderness is nothing.
9. Cold white sheets.
10. Fireworks boom in the distance.