I left the bar strutting past the paraplegic – self-conscious, ashamed, and almost proud of the way my legs worked. Outside, a driving rain and cold wind straightened my back the way one stiffens at the first touch of waist-high, cold ocean. I’m drenched. He’s still at the bar next to his wheelchair.

This deck of words has two jokers. I shuffle syllables, deal descriptions. A bird cuts across the sky. A cardinal as red as a heart sits on a clubbed fence post. A pair of squirrels folds leaves into the shape of diamonds under a straight tree. The world is flush. I say hit me.

In the warm sunlight of morning, I finished reading a memoir. It ruined me to reading for the rest of the day. Which means I don’t know what to do with this afternoon light, this sound of music in the distance, this soft breeze, or these paper-thin clouds. Enjoy it, I guess.  

A vole or a mole came in through a hole at the base of the door this morning. She wandered around sniffing the ground, scurrying across kitchen wood flooring. She climbed the screen door never quite sure how to get out of the house. A silly tale of a vole not a…

Sardine skies and coconut eyes, the wind shimmers in the trees. The brown-headed cowbird is a brood parasite – look it up. A groundhog has been digging at the mulch I used to cover up her den. I imagine the groundhog babies I might have accidentally trapped.  A sparrow picks at the gutters.

AQI. Apparently, it’s not good. The tickle in my lungs and throat already told me this. There are fires burning – which feels like a loaded statement about late-stage capitalism. We fight over whose suffering has been worse. “Now you know what we deal with.” Sympathy. None of us are getting out alive.

Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Lazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Crazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy

Smoke from the fires up north clouds the morning sky. The sun can be looked at directly – it’s the most vibrant, glowing orange one can imagine. I want to keep looking but probably shouldn’t. The sky seems muted, hazy, pale, and sickly. My gaze returns, again and again, to that day-glow orb.

I rub my eye and it burns. It’s too early to be this tired. The night sky, not entirely dark, reminds me of youthful summers and running through neighborhood lawns and fields. The trees, now as they were then, are tall silhouettes marking the boundaries of sight before everything becomes darkened night.