Flashes

Hanging onto plastic: pinks and yellows and blacks: the silky stream, highlighted by the store’s spotlights…

I could walk in there and make my winning purchase: something that will cover

marks spreading across my white Irish/English skin…

Sometimes just being here, observing the crawling and creaking of humanity is enough: the children who run with purpose to the spider on the sidewalk or seeing inside the farmhouse that serves as the center of the night’s starry sky.

But oh the fluorescent, how it lures you in like the two-headed lamb at the carnival.

Meanwhile, the bird’s wings close and open. The old woman’s walker wheels to the family table: last conversations happen.

But I am clicking the flashing x’s on my telephone.

And I am breathing, yes?

I am breathing.