There Are Lots of Guns Here—
and we cannot trust the refrigerator. When I return from the doctor with no diagnosis you’re standing in your underwear waving a bag of rotting vegetables like a monstrance. We cannot trust the radishes the color of a sad radish’s heart the minute it’s pulled from the ground and the rain has a voice like a president who cannot believe something he has just said about security or debt. We cannot trust the veteran on the first floor who stalks the parking lot barefoot in the rain then backs his truck into six different spots. We cannot trust that he hates you for being an immigrant, or that he has a gun, but maybe one day soon we’ll dial 911 and I do not think I could write the transformative elegy, the one that turns from grief to consolation in memory to an affirmation of immortality. Forgive me there are so many situations to diffuse that one wonders why buy fresh produce in the first place. Let’s bury our faces in the parsley; let’s seal up the day like a body bag.