On Friday morning, I went to the factory and poked the spinning jenny. You said I shouldn’t, but under the circumstances, it seemed the only appropriate course to follow because the war was upon them. Of course, they had begun it, but that fact was not yet weighing heavy on their minds. He just didn’t know: what made the gorgeous stinky weasel tick? What made him rise in the morning and revel in the stinkweed? He could only guess that it was a love of the odors and colors of purple – purple was the color – my favorite colors, deep and full of power. The power I wish I had, perhaps to know I have and have vaguely tapped into. I miss that color. Once, when I was left alone in a railway station, I filled a steamer trunk with whelks and faded photographs. You turned to me and said, “What is that on your arm?” I declined to tell you, leaving mystery hanging in the air. The strength of me knowing and you not… That there are 6,529 angry and armed squirrels amassing, waiting. You might worry…but you don’t: why? They are armed with cardboard. However, it is recycled? It’s corrugated. Utterly recyclable, but some people just can’t get with the program. Visions of egrets strangled in plastic loops and writhing in oil flicker through my mind. I dry my work area. “Where was I?” I think. Plastic loops, donuts constricting no moles. Writhing in oil, and flicker out. Here we saw a plethora of divers beneath the Aegean. Every one of them had a net filled with coelacanths and we wondered where they went. The love that was there and was gone the last time I looked. I woke up that morning and realized that I forgot who I went to bed with. He was a stranger, the wrong man. “The wrong man?” No way it’s the wrong man. He matched the description down to the tattoo upon his right shoulder, that is. The way you regarded me; my eyes, hair, and wrist…I wonder if he notices it…I cannot look at it. He cannot stop. I look away and I think how can it be that way….of course it can. I have bacon. And I have love.

Exquisite Corpse VI by thea.phabet

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