THIS IS NO LETTER TO YOU

What if it would not bear fruit. What if it even
would not simply flower. What if rain would
only bead as from the feathers of an eider’s
back. What if it would not even color
from shadow or take light’s warming
blanket. How can we then expect to name it

or cure it.

Forgiveness means softening the edges of what
is kept in the chest. It is still there, but
no longer scratches with each breath. How to
unwelcome something once let in. Usher out
with a broom or blade of abandoned paper. Spend
a life building symmetry, recalling

kindergarten and painting over and over the wings
of a butterfly. An exercise in memory, in match and
mismatch, in keeping it even.

Is salt-beef just for wartime? I can cure you. Use brine.
Use smoke, burn something down. Dry it against
stone. If it needs sugar, find it where it has been. It is where
it last was left.

How many hours can these birds eat pebbles, their
sweetening complaint finds my window. I am always in
this smoking jacket, and I am never smoking. I pretend this
pane is a mirror. We are full of possibilities. We are
closed. This is no letter to you, no taptap morse code or
embroidery of names on hankies tucked into battle, this

is forged of looking out of windows, coffee, and the music of
my body when it is only mine.

There is want. There is want that means appetite and there
is want that means deficit. Dishes in the sink pile oranged
with spice, sheets weeks overdue at the Laundromat blocks
over. Rings on this table, grounds on the counter like coal
dust,

seeds on the floor from the market’s bouquet; black
and round against the wooden floor, they pollinate

nothing. I have taken them from the dusting backs
of bees, the wind, and anuses of birds, into the dull
and paint-peeled face of this room. Pretty things
are mated for, and simply must exist somewhere: on
tables, tied to trees on lawns, leaping over fences. Who would
be the wiser if

this streetcar just kept driving. If a life was built on silk and
dance-cards, clickclick shoes and dishes in the sink. No need
to nest; to pull strands from this corner of a memory
or that. Why weave the scraps and spit to build
anything at all, or pull my hair out. This could be
it, then.

Iris Moulton lives in Salt Lake City, Utah. Her work can be found in Gigantic, American Short Fiction, Center for Fiction, and more recently in her book Tofu of Kansas(Sensitive House).