There’s always one. Some slip in the system, some grist folded in with the flour, as your hands, all sugar and slight, damasked with bends, weave the requisite meal from thin strings of pearl millet, xanthan gum. Trust that structure limits like, you think sometimes, church windows limit sunlight into color. You know it’s not the same though it accounts for your never leaving, never throwing down your life like a bowl of fine wedding china. Sequence perfects. Repeat it to yourself. Sequence . . . Until it becomes silence, or silence said and softly. Softly, you wonder if all souls aren’t bees battering against the body’s windows. All bodies beating against their breaths, a habit of unstreakable glass. In the kitchen’s undivided sunlight, you measure yourself against those little lies you tell, whisked together, molars of salt, distant spices, imperfect leavening. You stare at your shape in a countertop that throws off all obligation of light. Some night soon you’ll haul yourself out from far beneath this life to find you only what you are.
Read on . . .
“Not an Elegy,” a poem by Patrick James Errington