A. Have I once again miraculously turned the corner of belief, climbed out? And for how long this time before the trap-door snare descends to snap the neck back under the forest? So terrifying and cruel the way it just happens, and no one has even spoken a word.
Now I will be capable of caring for my fellow human, the garden, the seedlings, myself, write again, or doodle philosophically or only in bare color.
But, first, what should I wear to accept the marvel of upright vertical? Can I afford [justify] new shoes? No one will recognize the entirety of the trauma, it can be assumed.
B. Things were very sketchy for a while, you should know. If only I could have thrown the dies upwards to tell you, spell out the odd, unexpected destruction: go no further. The aft self-imposed chaos [an amputation], and the chronic, ever-defiant desire for explanation, the strange beauty of a logic that doesn’t exist.
The gadgets have multiplied while the others were left for dead, sleeping. Strangely some may provide a sense of solace that we are all in this together for a fraction of a second, repentant and brave.
C. I have sewn the holes in the tablecloths that tell the history of the village and its awkward inhabitants: a gossamer thin in the spring just-budded leaves, that astounding inch-worm, chartreuse green from a year ago before so much ice and snow.
I am writing, oddly, to ask you to help me remember [not forget] those pages in the book I tore out and folded, so that you could know and tell me in your own version, your unusual interpretation of the facts.
Maybe sing a background song that is soothing but upbeat—and coax like sudden sunlight over the majestic teal–its constant grandeur yet shifting metronome [through the one hundred and forty four windows], its waves pulsating the distant [key of ] sea.
[published in Crisis Chronicles online lit magazine, 2013]