Little Survivals
Little Survivals by Liam Strong
Copyright © 2025 by Liam Strong All Rights Reserved
First Digital Publication April 2025
Cover Design by Finnialla Wright
Published by PULP Literary Magazine pulplitmag.com
Acknowledgements
“All this Wind” was previously published in The Dillydoun Review
“Sigourney Weaver Comes to Movie Night at our Duplex” and “Boyfriend Takes Boyfriend to a Metal Show, Limbs Falling from the Sky” both appeared in miniskirt magazine.
“Iron Oxidation and Other Harbingers of Doom” has appeared in Pile Press.
“Sigourney Weaver Comes to Movie Night at our Duplex,” “Additional Supernatural Discoveries of the Dog Meadow Light, Circa 2022” and “There Was Never Anything to Forgive” all exist in Querencia Press’ Quarterly Anthology.
Content Warnings
Homophobia
All This Wind
This is about the dishes, isn’t it? I can do them if you want. We’re only at the beach house until Hanukkah is over, so one of us has got to do them at some point A dish is not like a bone until it is. The excavated half shell of a turtle, a porous halfolive, a wad of barfed up dune grass that Midge left on the kitchen tile in the shape of a plate You’re not paranoid, you’re just paranoid Your gift last night was lovely, don’t you know? I want you to know. Trust me. No one gives their partner clearance stickers from Michaels for Hanukkah that’s why they’re special, Gill. They’re whales, Gill. Whales! My favorite! I spied one yesterday in the air, which was as much a gift as any for our first night. The menorah wasn’t even lit. The week’s weather aims to be sublime, rain rain rainy rain The waves of clouds are made of whale fat, bulbous barnacled museums of ocean crust. I put all my stickers on the window above the sink. The drizzle makes them look like they’re crashing against the glass, their neon skin blotched with wet. Smiling. The horizon is a blank expression. A straight, effortless line. The house is creeping toward it, through the sod, the ancient wild grasses. We ought to go down to the farmer’s market tomorrow, buy some clams, mango, beets, a phalanx of spices. I’m doing the dishes. I’m doing them now. They’re going to be so clean. We’re going to eat so much off these we won’t know what to do with our stomachs
Okay. Look. You don’t have to read it all while we’re here, but just this one? The poem’s only half a page. It’s indented, just how you like them broken up and molded, like a kinstugi bowl. A poem is like pottery. No, my gifts aren’t all themed hey! Don’t shake that! It’s not more ornamental pottery, I promise. Just read the poem This guy’s virtually unknown A cult classic
Richard Siken doesn’t sound like a poet’s name! What does that even mean, you hill-billy academic. I’ll read my favorite bit aloud, like it’s supposed to be, just to give you a taste:
I take of my hands and give them to you but you don’t want them, so I take them back and put them on the wrong way, the wrong wrists. The yard is dark, the tomatoes are next to the whitewashed wall the book on the table is about Spain, the windows are painted shut
What’s wrong? Your face is sopping wax. Admit it! No, don’t. I’ll just leave it on the end table, for your hands to pick up You should read it before Midge does; she’s a smart puppy. I can’t believe her sometimes. I brought the wagon along in case you wanted to get loads of produce from town; I know how much you like your local finds. It’s tradition. Midge rode in the wagon instead, a sheep dog being shepherded by me! She’d hop out to collect ghost crabs in her maw. By the time you were done shopping we had a hundred piled in the wagon. You didn’t seem to notice. Honestly, I figured you’d be mad, sternly asking us to stop embarrassing you in public. Can’t you seem a little happy we’re here, Gill? I guess we know now which one of us isn’t superstitious There’s nothing wrong with a little speculation If you could see, the crabs look like they’re trying to pinch at your shorts. But what I see is them reaching out their claws to you, as if they were consoling you, as if they were pleading to be saved, as if they were beckoning.
A new picture frame! A coffee mug! You really do love me, don’t you? Not that I always need proof from you Midge is pawing at the screen door, or it’s the wind Been picking up a bit the past day or so. Bet the sailboats are gobbling the wind all up, their canvas teeth bloody with storm. This reminds me my gift is outside. Come on, I’m tugging at your wrists, heavy as deadbolts. Tada! It’s a painting, one of a billion little points. Like a Leon Viorescu. I stretched it across the sea, shot down all the gulls, fished out the spinner sharks Paint costs so much, so don’t worry, this didn’t cost me a dime. I only spent two nickels. Don’t look at me like that. Two halves don’t make up shit. Point your dumb face to the sky and see what I did. No ghosts All real It’s not a holiday if I don’t give you the world, you, my world There’s no blood (I know how you are around needles), no profanity, no excess. I painted wind that sweeps your hair, its tassels of muted bright. Even the bonfire pit, a tower of dead grass I finagled into brushes. Midge is here, too. Pet her, no, not that one, that one. She took me the longest to paint I just wanted her to be perfect, you know Is this how twins are made? Maybe for me I can tell you need a moment Take them all. All the moments. The sharks will not gnash. The ospreys are made of 3,200 dots, seven wings, and a whorl of discount yarn we had leftover in the hallway closet. Dinner will be ready when you come inside, even as you lead me back up the shore.
Sandpiper’s End. That’s the name of the beach house Their toothpick feet all gather at the farthest point, where the shore recedes like the tail of a comet into space. You bought the property from a guy whose divorce left him with one thing. A house he never vacationed to. Said he named it after reading a David Sedaris story. You wanted your mother to move here after she split ties with her partner Danielle? Yeah. My phone’s in the kitchen, I could invite her now. I’ll give her the rest of your presents, since it seems
you don’t want them. Maybe we shouldn’t have tried to make love as the sixth candle withered. Though it was pouring outside, your preferred ambience, neither of us could wriggle into a condom. I don’t know why
you’d think I’m not telling you everything. I’m the talkative one. Let’s get
this straight: your gift was a Ziplock bag full of snow with one drop
of blood in it. The haystack is a needle. It’s sharp, like blood No matter how close
I held it to my clavicle or the flames, it would not slim to water. We don’t know what to do with each other. Giving you the most imperfect gifts feels like I’m always constantly dying Quit handing me knives and corkscrews. A jar of sea glass is like you just want to prove that you think I’m crazy. So what if I am? I don’t need to fuck you to love you. The jellyfish are wrapping their limbs around the stilts of the Sandpiper. Hundreds of them. Wind isn’t carrying things away from here, Gill. It’s offering to us its own gifts. Hanukkah isn’t just for us. Whose blood is it, Gill? Whose blood? You’re looking
at me as if I’m a dream. I know you don’t I was awake at 3:00am last night, and I
could hear you flipping through the book of poetry I gave you. I don’t want to know what you think of it The stickers won’t stick anymore. No matter how much
I hammer them with my palm.
I had a dream once, or it was a memory, or it was a reality elsewhere, or it was happening now, or it was just a fragile hope You held me from behind, your breath a tincture of kale and rib eye. There was no sky, there was a question mark in the place of the ocean. Midge skipped like a stone across the sand into darkness, where I heard splashes of something thicker than water. Minutes later, she’d drag up the shore giant squid, angler fish, rotten ship keels, empty conch shells. I could feel the hair on my forearms magnetically reaching for the conches. I glanced at my fingers, which spiraled into the shape of tornadoes, willing themselves to fit into Midge’s offerings. Our dog prays to us every time she returns the branch we cast, Gill I wished we prayed I don’t care if you’re agnostic, if there’s too much hate from your biological Catholic dad in your veins. I’m here. Hate me. Hate me so much that something happens. Something could happen, and you wouldn’t have to touch me to prove yourself. Your hand isn’t a hand, your love isn’t love, your ghost isn’t a ghost. I’m sorry. Maybe that’s why you can get dressed without looking at a mirror You’re right It’s a burden just to believe in aftermath, in formlessness I can conjure ghosts for eight days but I don’t know what to do with all this wind. I can’t hold it, Gill. I’m a leaf that can’t fly. I’m frozen in place, and you’re crushing me. You’re the space between me and me and I have no stitches left I’m all needle, all blood, all whale. Look at me flounder. Look at me struggle.
I solved the problem, Gill The sandpipers are always swallowed by a wide-cheeked wave at the end of the story. Wait. There is no story. I’m retelling it because I changed it. The legs came off easy. A bird that doesn’t need to land is one where home is a meaningless syllabic sound The stilts hoisting the house up are another story, however. There are so many stories, when we just want ending, ending, ending. At one end of a wooden beam is a beginning, at the other a beginning. The point of the menorah is so you cannot burn a candle at both ends. The point is that we’re the ones burning, lingering against what extinguishes us. Your gift is in the car We don’t need to stay I’m over it Unwrap the legs and plant them in the sand before the tide erodes it all away. Don’t worry about the ocean. It knows how to find itself after it fails to reach for us. It’s our last night. Blow out the candles, and let’s go home.
Sigourney Weaver Comes to Movie Night at our Duplex
We’re out of popcorn again, Gill. It’s the seventeenth time this week, who knows in the month. Midge may die, I mean look at her–no, not her tail, don’t let the wagging deceive you of happiness–just look at her Look at me Okay I could possibly survive. It’s one movie, maybe two. Whenever we fall asleep on the loveseat. Maybe we make it just one longer movie, like Aliens, Alien 3 if we’re feeling really masochistic tonight. It’s this, the little survivals, the ones where we could die at any second because our needs aren’t met.
By the way, are our needs not met? This seems to be the usual, our camp between two floral arms with the fibers fraying. Midge burrows, you know, or the couch has lost lower back strength, contracted by scoliosis, maybe an STD, who knows whose fault, but that’s the least of our concerns. The biggest predicament is dinner.
At some point, fifteen minutes or an hour and fifteen minutes in, you spoil that the xenomorph was created as an analog for homosexual domination, gay oral, men like us dispersing spawn like parasites. There’s transphobia too, but Ripley has a daymare of a baby xenomorph bursting from her abdomen before you get to that. My hand in your hand, exasperated, our conjoined hand up to my face to block the terror. Our hand an androgyny, our hand feeding us fear. My saliva an acid, but not the kind that melts, blood syrup from the alien, the proverbial unknown. Which is to say, Gill, that every thing that carries safety can also carry our trauma.
Moreover, popcorn, Gill Popcorn It’s aimless, the sex brought to my lips And trust me–it’s not you, it’s not you. It’s not you. We’ve run out of condoms, lube, and we’re working with straws here. The headbite, inner jaw, the preferred method of killing, you say, isn’t the alien’s apparatus for consumption. Uncanonical, another synonym for us, but unconfirmed: maybe the xenomorph eats whatever it feels like. Whatever it needs, or doesn’t need. It can choose starvation; it can choose fulfillness. Think of that, Gill, how we choose not what makes us full, but that we can be at all. And when, and how, and with whom.
I’m not a facehugger, not like I used to, not like when we slept over on third shift nights, our separate places, yours that old garage attic.
The rent was cheap and we were richer because of it. As people, I mean. I hugged your face then like Smaug around his treasure, a serpent around certain kinds of organic fruits. When we can’t sense thermal radiation, when our camouflage blends with the loveseat, when breath is forgotten. We used to tell each to breathe, to not be passive Even Midge could tell when we’d be awake, nibbling at our earlobes.
Maybe the problem is that we need a new couch, need to make it smaller. If a twoseater is any less, though, where do we put feeling? If all I’m doing is touching you, consuming you, Gill, it’s like I wouldn’t be touching anything at all That’s how it works: we can’t scream in space because no one hears us. So we’re not screaming at all. Like we don’t have neighbors, or have too many, or the walls are thin enough that your father a state over can hear us fucking. Is it everyone else we fear, the noises we make, the crunch and pop of something delicious that could, in the end, be bad for us?
That love, too, could be toxic to us?
Maybe the problem is also that Ripley fears love, loving, its adjacencies, off-shoots, and spin-offs. She is often the strongest and weakest character all at once, Gill, but I like to think that the viewers take part in this competition as well. (Midge, of course, the only one really paying attention, ears poised for jumpscares, and squished between our laps, is the strongest character in our story.)
Because at the end of Aliens, the decimated crew dies disgusted at the xenomorph, the so- called perfect being that is in no way godlike, and yet exudes the horror of one. You’re an essayist when you’re left to your own head, lover, but even when Ash reveres the xenomorph in Alien, we’re still left with immorality in our mouths. The couch wants to devour us whole, hide our bodies from who loves or once loved us. We could stay here forever, then. We could stay here, and the universe would be none the wiser, because a couple of lazy fags won’t rescue a crew of space militants from dying.
The horror isn’t that we’d probably die too, nor would it be that the xenomorph isn’t the true villain. It’s the unseen cast, the government, the world–whoever you want to give names to, Gill. If we could fear with full eye contact, then we might as well fuck, no love necessary, but within reach of cushions. We can be disgusted, we’re allowed to, we’re allowed to be fulfilled by disgust.
We could get the cheapest, most synthetic popcorn from the corner store in our pajamas, the kind that no seasoning could save We could die by our own diseases, our own kind, but at least we can buy fulfillment for just a few bucks. We could leave the kernels in our gums, sharp imitations of fangs, so that nothing will ever taste bad again We don’t even need to brush our teeth afterward
Additional Supernatural Discoveries of the Dog Meadow Light, Circa 2022
Please. It’s for research, Gill. Research! Even if the Paulding Light already has several confirmed debunkings, I want to contribute more And no, I won’t find a more popular paranormal hotspot, and no, don’t you dare call it a coldspot, you’re not as funny as you think you are, except you are, and no, I won’t pick a place closer for my birthday The day I was birthed into the world, my body red and bituminous with firedamp. I swear I will jump out of this Honda right now if we had better life insurance.
We’re near the Wisconsin border, where my mother was born, but I don’t know where For all we know we’d be at the wrong crevice of the state Michigan doesn’t feel like a bridge because it isn’t. Michigan doesn’t feel like a special place where special shit happens, but that’s why this is special, Gill. Perhaps, and take note, the thesis of all birthday culture. That we manifest the special energy, plop it into a gift, and then we end the day with some orgasms. It’s easy, really, maybe too easy, but it’s easy to be this special, or not, but it’s easy to think otherwise, a couple and their sheepdog with the backseat all to herself, the normalcy of what’s special.
Which, of course, makes a place like Paulding go from unspecial to special in the flash of a light! Your favorite conclusion–no, let me guess–isn’t that the phenomenon in Paulding is a product of automobile headlights careening from a perfect angle on US 45. No, I think you’re into the swamp gas theory, probably because it sounds both funny and plausible all at once. It’s valid, checks out, at least for you, Gill, your logic as bulletproof as a ghost. I can see it on your face, the embarrassment, simply from me knowing, but that could be what makes our particular folklore, for lack of a better term, special.
You see, Gill. Well, you see too clearly. Everyone needs glasses these days, so maybe I’m plagued by tricks of the eye. Virgin forest blurs into stoneface up here, beyond the Straits of Mackinac, the sky and stars too close for comfort. And I thought cities were claustrophobic. You see things for what they are and nothing else, because really, nothing else is there You, me, Midge, an unpaid car with a loan from your aunt, the last one you have, a Coleman cooler with a few Sprites or Sierra Mists. It feels like there’s miles between all of those things. Because there aren’t
The grandparent’s lantern needs more oil The railroad brakeman’s flashlight dies while attempting to save a train from a head-on collision. An indigenous woman dancing along the powerlines, each fracture of starlight just another question to be asked. A vacationing dogman from Wexford County holding a rave before he has to go home again. A college girl and her soon-to-be ex-girlfriend, her laptop with porn flickering like a silent film chopping up the night
Really, Gill. Light can come from anything.
There’s light in Paulding during the day too, Gill. Lots of it. Not just from the sun, but from people, refracting leaves, snow if the sheets are flat enough. The Paulding Light is any explanation you want it to be, you dummy You have to let things be the difficult answer, the gift that challenges you, even if you don’t feel good giving it. That’s not the point. I want you–I need you–to see something that makes your face brighten with something unexpected. Even if it’s a maple tree at the distant mouth of the valley where every firefly in the Upper Peninsula congregates, a tenement house or church of glowing, shameless insects, unafraid of being seen.
Even if it’s a match I have to keep hidden from you the whole trip, just to watch it disappear again. Even if I have to imagine your reaction in the darkness leftover.
Boyfriend Takes Boyfriend to a Metal Show, Limbs
Falling from the Sky
I mean, for real, Gill, do you really want to get a concussion? If you get dropped on the monitors, I’m going to save you, duh, but I might kill you, which totally isn’t my fault.
Midge would also be upset, because she’s the calmest and takes her anxiety meds straight from your hand when you fill her bowl with kibble. Does tinnitus scare you, does the idea that you could never hear her paws waddling on the laundry room tile put a twinge in your brain stem. It does for me, and I can’t even hear the vocalist, let alone you, next to me, the crowd a corduroy caldera behind us. Horns sprout from their arms, little antlers, plastic cups like torn IVs on the venue floor ***
What band is this, can we be a band, Gill, I’ll play whatever you can’t, but why is the stage so high, and who’s the rhythm guitarist, can I be her, can I vault this barricade, do you get kicked out for crowdsurfing, excuse me, sir, sir, sir, what is your crowdsurfing policy, do I need a permit or a surfboard leash do go up, can I be your dog, no, it’s like a Sex Pistols reference, and I’m more like my boyfriend’s cat because we already have a dog who very much loves him. Sorry. Sorry. Ope. So sorry.
***
I have come to the conclusion that the unsafe action is probably safer than us, safe like a rip current when you know exactly it’ll happen, cut, shear into you, tidal bore, our shoulders mingled with several other shoulders We are many limbs, literally, not literally, whatever sounds most punk. If you split your skull when you fall, will we see the memories tremble out, glitter and cold brew. Beer on the lip of my sock, the cuff of my jeans. Somewhere in between is my leg, then your leg, the things that carry us, upward, downward, both all at once.
Right into the merch table. Invisible and slippery through the arms of security. Gill, it’s not like ascending to heaven, descending into hell, et cetera, I promise, we’re going to die but if it’s like this, I’ll be disappointed, maybe because everything else seems so much more viable.
And up our alley. And I’m your alley, the one where we get beat up by ourselves, copies of copies, the people surrounding us sweaty and thinking all the same shit I am. Gill, Gill. Gill.
We’re all wondering if this is our chance, the one and only, so go ahead, do it, get fucked up, or don’t, or whatever feels suitable to your needs. Because pain is just an idea entering your body, your head obscured by light, Gill, I see you until I do, because for a moment, you could be anyone in the crowd. And I wouldn’t be alone. You’d be everywhere, which sounds so spiritual because it isn’t, the lyrics quoted verbatim from the mic transferred into your tongue Go ahead, we’re whoever we want to be, but I want to be the person who witnesses you fall into your own arms. Like you really, really care. Because there’s blood on your shirt, and I sure hope it’s mine.
Nightwalkers, or the Stormless Calm of the Century
It was a night empty of worms dredged from the rain, you said, pillage in the form of brass mugs, telephone stalks like shorn rye Gill, the storm blares the way popular straight girls called us faggots in high school. The storm is right–apocrypha in our bloodstream, blood for burning, our little tempests in our palms.
I wanted to write you a letter from a lifeguard’s tower when I wasn't even a lifeguard and I wanted to place it under your sunblock while you were watching. The sun can singe us with or without cloud cover, Gill It’s a publicized secret, it’s your living wish to die, it’s coded script lounging within your gums. You once called a winter night–unseasonably balmy–a stormy and dark night. I stole your pillow, called it a slut, gave it back, and you weren’t one anymore. That accursed miracle, what power words give, what we don’t say. We sleep often, and without speech between us. If we sleep enough, we won’t ever have to speak up.
I flew to Florida to visit your father after he fell from a forklift, because someone had to visit, because someone had to, because maybe he would have more to say to me. I wrote all the conversations he and I had before his last EKG onto freckles on your back, his back, both of your freckles. You guessed most of it correctly, which wasn’t surprising.
We celebrated by committing arson on our whole town while everyone snored, and no one was sad because we all lived. There’s no such thing as a storm, Gill. Lovers do this thing in movies where they scream and dance in torrential downpour as a metaphor about not allowing anything to stop them. But everything can, and will. And if we didn’t dance, said nothing, remained dry the whole time? Is what breaks us down, tears at our shingles and glass, all our fault, Gill?
It’s known meteorologically that, even if we can’t feel it, there’s always some small percentage of wind moving on the planet. No one is out on this dilapidated boardwalk instructing us that we have to run or hide or face any such storm, honey. Because whether or not I believe the tension in the air is actually there, the water on my skinny arms actually water, thunder in reply to thunder, the problem still exists. Plain as day.
There Was Never Anything to Forgive
I won’t force the metaphor, Gill. I’ll leave the question hanging there for you, when you come back home, the corner lamp left dim My bracelet is still on I normally take shit like that off when I shower or sleep or fuck. On a hierarchical scale, fights can be wars, can be battles, can be skirmishes, can be just about anything you’d name on a thesaurus website I’m not using the words like or as ***
The Akhmatova quotes excommunicated to the region of the freezer handle. I call the paper scraps edgy and you unstitch all the pockets in your end of the closet like kidneys from a ribcage. In return, I leave you love letters under your pancakes written by yourself. It’s a pure kind of evil, not pure evil. We go back and forth, which is a kind of fucking, which I didn’t know could happen without the act, the event, the pomp and parade. We remove the bed from the bed when we’re angry. I told my mother about you once in a dream of hers that she texted me about at 5 A.M. I wish I knew what she had said, but also don’t. ***
You left the lamp on after you came, while you slept, as you left. It has never been turned off, Gill. I’d like to believe that, so I will.
***
Before we moved in, another couple lived there. I don’t know if they were gay, though I don’t know if the couple before us knew if the couple before them were gay, either. If the grand- couple were gay, which they probably were, they wouldn’t have known if the god or gods they believed in were gay. There is an unrelenting train with passenger seats full of emptiness. It sounds impossible, but it isn’t.
***
The silkworms and milkweed bloomed at the same time this year, which means we’ll have to keep doing the same old shit in the same old place. I’d like to have options. Or at least a benchmark, a reasonable reason for change, a changeable change,
one that seems doable, within the range of our bodily functions and mental health Gill, the magnets say everything otherwise, a language we can’t parse even though it’s in our mothers’ tongues. Your favorite one, the favorite because it’s stupid, so stupid, so great, so great it’s stupid, about how the salmon aren’t running this season. I believe you aren’t stupid because I believed it. We’re stupid until proven otherwise, forgivable until our names are taken away from us I’ve given us our all and I’ll do it again until we feel like less is also enough. I replaced my kneecaps with bottle caps to make a joke before, because the laughter peeked into the kitchen looking for you In the middle of the apartment is another apartment, and we’re always on the edge of what could be. Our pity might just be that, Gill, edging and edging. Since the salmon can’t run without feet, can’t swim without being between the edge of water and sunlight. And just being okay with that.
Iron Oxidation and Other Harbingers of Doom
White vinegar, Gill. You leave it alone in the tart, the shovel. Not what we bury, not the hole, not my blood My father, the creative carpenter, would bellow that kind of joke. Of blood rusting, not drying. Of how to turn breath into a methodology of rotting.
It’s the hinges, friable little sparks that don’t seem to amount to anything. But do. Gill, it’s not creaking–Midge just puts her full weight on it, until the shed door is all mountain dog. Don’t joke that there’s the smell of discarded pennies, hemoglobin, dying electrons. Don’t joke. Or do, because it’s what’s left, what’s saving the wood from fraying, the Glidden paint from peeling Is it because I call it autumn and you call it fall? You think there’s a difference, so I’ll humor you.
Mary Oliver said something about leaves. Once. Probably. She didn’t make a joke, however–maybe it’s that wisdom is a kind of double entendre, or it’s that every time you laugh at me I’m too mindless to tell when you’re witty or witty. I can fix that. Which is to say I could rake all the leaves with just my hands.
Inventory of 5x3 sloped roof storage shed, olive-green, vinyl bird-of-paradise wind chime, loose siding nails:
-Nitrile-coated gardening gloves, medium
-Various plastic flamingoes of various sizes
-Unopened grass seed bag, 7 lbs
-Dirt, sand, caked mud
-Effigies of grayed quickthorn in the visage of lake sturgeon
-Pepsi Zero bottle cap wedged between wood flooring
-Unused bird scare tape
-Clementine/tangerine lawn rake with the rightmost tines missing, headbase rusted
-Fluorine, bromine, oxidants of unknown myriad, etc., halogens with the lungs removed
-Cute whale watering can
Corrosion is like erosion, Gill When your parents’ cottage lurched toward the North Atlantic, bloodworms spilling from the cliffside. Your mother’s wrinkles, like meteoric shards from the Golden Gate Bridge, chains flaking away. We can’t imagine bones beneath skin, Gill. Well, it’s hard to, at least. Iron just can’t come into contact with water and oxygen. Easy. But the human body, which retains naturally stored iron, rusts just by looking at it. You’re older now! Okay sorry, I forgot you saw pallor in your stubble last month. But still, I’m not wrong for once. I want to be, though.
The more I think about it, the door could just break off. Midge needs a new roof for her doghouse, and I’m sure we could amputate the wood into something presentable. Before the winter comes, before the frost heave, before fractures create musical notes through the road, before we spelunk into another rabbit hole, before we can’t climb out, before we start seeing cracks and epidermis of rashy flame in everything we own, before we get paranoid again and evade work like another plague, before we have to start over.
Before I have to say before.
Archive of leaves in the backyard and alley, as denoted by increasing frequency and flammability:
-Horse chestnut
-Rowan
-Beech, serrated, not like leaves, not like that, but like jigsaw teeth
-Linden hearts, fragrant of butane, swept in from a neighbor we don’t know exists
-Northern red oak, pooled of bruise, unburnt
-Wych elm, probably, uncertain, bodies and stems barely legible through the ash
-Flyleaf, your collection of cookbooks, or what can be assumed to be
-Blades, needles, ochre of warmth that could die out on the wick of your finger
-Silver maple, because who doesn’t have them
The one time we fucked in every room we pay rent That’s when We forgot something, someplace.
Ferric materials. Half-life of the frame. Where we walk through. The height and width of a dimension. Hyperbole, contrast in lighting. One lightbulb, an infinite variable of us who can’t replace it. The cartoon water, just a line, Gill. Where at some point, we drink And aren’t thirsty
It’s funny, the image of a man twisting a screwdriver to dismantle a door. The shed not with its jaw popped, I swear It’s funnier when you’re mad Gill Encrusted like plaque, rust from rust, just won’t let you yank it out. I can call my father, tell him to bring his drill, and you can just pretend you’re taking a shower and shaving or something Or not Some things are better kept At least in the places we can remember them. I haven’t seen the backyard in weeks, but I can still see Midge’s ears. So we’ve got time.
There’s enough foliage beneath us that we could start a forest above and below us, Gill When the door comes off the shed, I know what we can do Or not But hear me out on this idea of sailing, rowing, paddling with our palms and paws through an ocean we made. Out of nothing. It can be worth it, the distraction, the neglect, the unpaid attention to what surrounds you and I. Flames of crinkle, flames inside of flames, a metaphor of burning not about a couple of faggots burning. Gill, there’s no such thing as drowning, even if we’ve ruined the frame after the door falls. Once it does, we’ll be able to come and go as we please, without evidence of us, Gill. Without a threshold, without a padlock and handle, an entrance has that much more room to breathe
Liam Strong (they/them) is a queer neurodivergent cripple punk writer who has earned their BA in writing from University of Wisconsin-Superior. They are the author of the chapbook Everyone's Left the Hometown Show (Bottlecap Press, 2023). You can find their poetry and essays in Vagabond City and new words {press}, among several others. They are most likely gardening and listening to Bitter Truth somewhere in Northern Michigan. Find them on Instagram/Twitter: @beanbie666. https://linktr.ee/ liamstrong666