After the affair, we didn’t speak again for two months.
When we saw each other again, he hugged me and whispered in my ear, “Miss you.”
Too stingy to include the I.
Miss you. Like he was a fragment in search of a pronoun.
Miss U! Or he was at a football game rooting for Mississippi State.
Miss You I have just won a beauty pageant in the State of Myself.
So I push him away and say, “That’s Ms. Me to you.”
No I don’t.
He says “Miss you” and my heart goes carousel and jackhammer, because he misses me—or ostensibly, he is the one missing me, at least someone or possibly something misses me and it feels good, the way cold chicken tastes
like steak when you’re starving.
So, I ask myself, what is the least I would settle for? What if he just said “Miss…”
and looked at me pointedly? What if he just pushed out the
“Meh.” Could I scrape
together the missing letters until he missed me in three phantom syllables,
the ghost of my desire to be longed for?
After he leaves, I pull the words from my ear, fold them,
put them
in my purse. I might be hungry later.
-From Ceremony for the Choking Ghost by Karen Finneyfrock
In the entrance of my friend’s somewhat ghetto apartment building.
In a parking lot off 12th Avenue North.
I wanted to be a rain salesman,
carrying my satchel full of rain from door to door,
selling thunder, selling the way the air feels after a downpour,
but there were no openings in the rain department,
and so they left me dying behind this desk—adding bleeps and subtracting chunks—and I would give a bowl of wild blossoms, some rain, and two shakes of my fist at the sky to be living.
-John Engman
The metamorphous which the caterpillar must undergo to transform from the caterpillar into the butterfly is very painful, but unless the caterpillar endures the metamorphous, the caterpillar cannot become the butterfly. The caterpillar has no idea what to expect when the process is complete. As the metamorphous progresses, the caterpillar slowly starts to understand what it is happening. However, the caterpillar has difficulty believing what is occurring, despite the wings which are forming.
After the caterpillar’s metamorphous is completed, and the caterpillar has become a butterfly, the butterfly is still in the cocoon. Regardless of how hard the butterfly tries, the butterfly cannot possibly fly until the butterfly first discards the cocoon. Before the butterfly can fly, the butterfly must force it’s way out of the cocoon, which takes some effort.
-Tsúnyöta Köhe’t
