#routine fables

[routinefables]

Smile, though your heart is breaking

Honey, take the bricks off your back and cut me some slack. Of course I’m not able to help. I just want to see your best self. I’ve stuck around for years to see you smile. Clearly, I don’t mind waiting a while. I just feel I am possibly owed for all of the times you looked like a toad, for all of the times you were sobbing and mad, for all of the times I said you looked sad, and wanted you to fix it right then it front of our bewildered friends. You can’t leave me like this. Come back here and give me a kiss.

[routinefables]

Imaginal discs

I am elemental soup, doing time to decide what I’ll be next.

The purist parts remain -- hunger, humor, color -- the rest dissolves.

Atoms are assigned, new patterns emerge from old, fibrous walls.

Ravenous, mad, vibrant, stumbling from a prison, but now I can fly.

[routinefables]

Cocoon

I built myself a cocoon it took a year of gathering comforts close to my skin to toughen me into something else. It’s lonely here and I fear I am growing accustomed to just me talking to me and afraid of other voices. I know this can’t last. Wings must emerge or else they die.

[routinefables]

Feb. 16 (Broken pipes)

Water betrayed us those nights. Expanded, split copper, ran down the backs of walls, rotting and ruining, then gone.

We gathered snow to flush toilets, imagining ourselves pioneers while the city fell further into a prehistoric time.

Showers a precious commodity, taken in unknown homes. Drinking water handed out with the softness of charity. I don’t know who to blame: Is it this city? Is it just this life, an angry God smiting me? Or is it a failed state, unable to provide?

[routinefables]

Feb. 14 (Power down)

I held the word “snow!” on the tip of my tongue, not daring to swallow for fear that it would melt along with my dream of a rare taste of winter. I waited. I stayed up so late, stepping outside every hour in my thin coat. A man and his dogs shivered by, I waved and said, “snow?” He said no, just pellets of ice. At 2 a.m., I captured it: real flakes flying in the streetlight that soon went dark. Though powerless, my house gathered so much white I didn’t need light to see it.

[routinefables]

Week 3: Progressing

This is Purgatory: a script from a doctor for palliative drugs to soothe, to increase hunger, to boost. But it isn’t like living, like craving or needing food after running, or the sweet rest of a long, good day. We carry you from room to room, around street corners where you once liked to walk. We offer you to the sun when it peeks through the clouds, you make yourself flat in the grass, absorbing the heat, in the last few days you have left.

[routinefables]

Week 2: January bluebonnet

First to a party that won’t start for months, you are a beautiful pest to the host. A startling indigo dress says too much, a mouthful of troublesome boasts. A worm underground must have pushed you out, a premature shove from the nest. Alas, you will die in the next winter freeze, back in the soil you shall rest.

[routinefables]

Lucky

It didn’t look like luck, shit falling down like it does, ruining days and clothes, changing the course of my life. I can’t get excited to start again, everything still broken. But I kept a shard of each day to use as kindling on the last. I hear you say “lucky” again as I burn myself clean.