it is a very empty day with giant crows making their noises and there is nothing for the sounds to echo off of so it just goes and goes and we all wonder what happens to them across the dust-filled prairies and sing these songs with yellow words to put children in norway to sleep: mares eat oats eat oats eat oats and little lambs eat ivy a kidd'll eat ivy too wouldn't you and so on, and on and on and on into the wet places where children drown and fertilize clover and pig feed. that nobody loves. like josh jeffrey. with the bucked teeth and funny shaped body and who knew the capital of alaska was anchorage, and said to me once pomegranates will make your teeth shrivel and turn soft; he read so in a book and i believed him because i read books a lot too and knew it was true. in a book that doesnt lie. with the ugly tall grey socks and velcro shoes. not the book, josh jeffrey. he always yelled “touchdown tacotown” when he made points in p.e. which he never did but once I remember he was carrying the ball and dropped it and it crossed the out-of-bounds line and he got excited and started yelling those words but nobody knew why and they told him it was out of bounds and he got quiet and pink and i watched his eyes quietly blink behind his thick glasses and he probably wanted to be a seahorse then in the artic sea, like his dad, who was in town once and I saw him then and he was just like josh and i remember being sad because he was predestined to be like that and i watched him walk to his big fat blue truck with his batman backpack hoisted to his neck and his fist balled up in his dads ugly hand and he kept looking up at him and so did i, except i looked down at them from behind the leaves from the tire-tractor on the fields around johnston elementary school in the october sunshiny shining and picked the scab on my knee and I started crying to myself because the scab came off and josh was so rosy and his dad looked grumpy and pushed the gas pedal too hard and left black streaks on the streets and nobody knows how to be, but i didn’t think about that then, i think about it now, and then the bell rang and i had to clamber off the tire and had to run back to the rice-smell of the old lady red crochet laminated animal crackers room with blood running down my leg and my art teacher told me monday that i will never grow up because im brilliant and i wonder where she heard this stupid rumor and want to climb on to my yellow tractor tire and maybe pick goat-heads out of my socks or watch flecks of light in the grasses and throw rocks at josh jeffrey if he comes by because i really hate him for being so rosy that one day because it makes me feel alone and dumb and sad for everyone and i hope the rocks break his ugly glasses in half.
birds and knees
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