Spring

Dear Lonely Animal [Please share my Korean food with me]

47 Dear Lonely Animal, Please share my Korean food with me. All the complementary appetizers in their little white bowls are so delightful. I arrange them this way and that: a line, a circle, a zigzag, a pyramid—! I switch their ordering principles and accessibility for more amusement. You would love it here with all this hilarity. And anyway, I’m afraid to go home by myself even though it’s the middle of the day. Because my house is down an alley which makes everyone look suspicious, especially strangers like the roofers who have been hanging out (when they’re not on the roof) by the enormous Dumpster they brought with them. How will I fool them when they watch to see which of the neighborhood doors I will enter? How when they grip their nail-guns and ripping implements, when the frayed wires spray from beneath the lid of their mechanic’s tool box? How when they glance at their unmarked van with tinted windows? When they make a mental note, and the Dumpster there 48 half Ālled with debris, i.e., Ālled just enough? I brushed some dirt away from my face just this morning. I can stay up all night with the nightmares I make for myself. I wish I could teach myself to be less generous in this fashion. Fortunately, Lonely Animal, I am always alone when I begin to cry, that the other animals will not see the wound in me. Like gangrene from a bear trap injury! How it can’t be carved out with any knife I’ve sharpened, and even fragrance, a lavender essence poured over my temples, does nothing to restore, but like I drowned in breathing soft pulsing petals and the pain beating there in the dark— Oh Animal, the sun is falling over me now. The sun, with all its dumb rectangles of light. The sun, with its big broad shapes of light yellow as dying catalpa leaves. ...