Because if I talk to more than three people in one day I end up racing around my room like Homer Simpson when his family went to the Science Museum and afterward Marge had to tranquilize him with beer and TV. Then I put on headphones and twirl the radio dial around looking for old songs by Stevie Wonder or Three Dog Night, which I turn up to absurdly high volumes. Only after hours of this can I get to sleep.
A town where the houses kiss good morning, pinstripes of lawn some neighbors tended beautifully with tools and grass food. We didn’t work to earn that row of bushes where we learned the slow inversion of roses, the opening so far we thought they’d close again around the stem. This ode to roses at that house with six cousins, and a brother who’d taste anything that shone: nine pennies, the yellow candy egg in the sand on our favorite beach, and those golden petals, raining, raining down on his laughing face.
Dawn Corrigan’s work is forthcoming at Nanoism, Right Hand Pointing and Stymie and has previously appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Pindeldyboz, Wigleaf, and elsewhere. She blogs regularly at The Nervous Breakdown.