starts

The semester is closing its jaws and retreating back into the jungle.  I am told to write what is true, what is fact and to gather my sources carefully, picking only the purest fruit.  I have moved away from the land of metaphor and experimental sentences.  The semester was watching, eager to bat me with its paws, claws only partly retracted, from my creative whimsy, my poetic prose.  Now the semester is slinking backward to sleep away a few weeks of summer and I open my notebook to the light and let my heart pour out.


***


The shades are tight around my windows like drawstrings on a velvet sack.  I want to keep the night.  There was a siren that woke you and you reached for your right foot and realized your sock was missing.  That sock also took your foot, ankle, shin captive.  You rubbed your right knee because nothing existed further down.  Must have been stolen from you.  Must be lost wandering in some bodiless landscape with all the other arms and legs that were blown off near the finish line.  I hook my two arms around your torso and imagine we're a seven limbed super creature capable of anything.  You love me and resent me. 


***


She'd like to get one of those espresso machines to add to our already too crowded counter.  I didn't argue.  I never win.  Besides I like coffee, though I'm almost certain I'd much more enjoy a swath of counter space to butter my toast.  But when there's so much to fight about and so much uncertainty in the world, I don't argue about an espresso maker, it's not a baby, or a new house, or another lover.  It's a machine, a clunky, superfluous machine.  Things could be worse.


***


Sister Mary Anne loved me.  I used to throw rocks over the fence into the street.  One day she took my hand and put a piece of butterscotch in it.  "Don't throw everything away" she told me. 


***


The pockets of salmon oil danced in the frying pan, sashaying against the icy river water on one of Kodiak Island's many waterways.  My hands shook, not from the cold, but from the fear that Mama bear and her two babies would round the river bend to track down the delicious smell of fried sockeye salmon.  Our crew took turns conducting dishes duty.  We all hated it.  We were camped right above the river.  A short trail took you down to the river bank.  The only thing separating our little tents from the bears that frequented this section of the river was a fragile looking electric fence.  It seemed no more rigid or daunting than a string of Christmas lights.  We also had a shot gun.  When one person went down to the river to wash dishes another played look-out from above, the electric fence stopped at your belt line.  I barely scrubbed the pan before I heard my co-worker clear her throat.  In the distance, I could see a bit of splashing.  I'm still not sure if it was Mama bear.  I scrambled up the river's embankment and got behind the electric fence.  I stood there for a while, waiting, the humps of spawning salmon galloping like horses in the river. 


***