Vesuvius, There Are Easier Ways to Make Friends
- Vesuvius, There Are Easier Ways to Make Friends
It was an installation of thrushes. sEach household had to have corpses of birds. And rags. There was a bounty of thrushes and madras pressing at the windows, from inside, cotton bolls, too, pressed from out the floorboards, along the countertops, and the sinks. In the ears of our daughter while she was sleeping. It was the most thickened existing you’ve ever. And, look, the nickels, even. Every part of the house stacked high with nickels, the shiny kind. You could see them if you looked in at the window.
There wasn’t room for people inside. But they were there. “I love you!” said Mt. Vesuvius. If you know what that means.
Could you imagine being suffocated by nickels? Or other metallic properties? How many could you hold in your mouth before it felt like this life was just worthless? I’d say it depends on whether you’re sleeping. Or you’re with someone you love. The whole house was just trying to breathe.
A database is not one of those things normal people spend their time counting, because each individual record feels like it’s worthless. But if you take them together there is a shape of people, people who are inside a house, sleeping, and even eating, and mainly shopping for stuff on the internet. People who forgot to be noticed doing anything special.
They’re just happy to be the figures in a Diorama display. Like players in some movie, but not really, because you’re not allowed to move anywhere. The people could all be named (1). And the other (1)’s are kept in storage, for after the crisis. That’s all any catastrophe is anymore. A crisis that some of the (1)’s are now missing. [End Page 47]
Kent Shaw’s first book, Calenture, was published in 2008 by the University of Tampa Press. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Missouri Review Online, and elsewhere. He recently graduated with his PhD from the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston.
