Missing
Every night I look at your bed, wrinkled sheets still caught in mid-ripple. The breeze from the cracked-open window billows the curtains, the ones we argued over. “White has no life,” you said. “It’s an absence, a blank slate.” No, it is the sum of all the colors, I insisted, and now I’m looking at the room to make sure that’s so. I’m searching for a prism of seven colors, but what I see is smoke rising above a dark forest, turning blue. Against the whitening sky, it catches fire. Where is the color of abandonment, I want to know.
Urgent Care
Hospital cameras are aimed like guns at her non-viable swell, but an egg is not a chicken, no matter which came first. The patient, doubled over and grieving, is hustled to the pavement, citing new laws. Empty when full she sees printed on both sides of the receptacle outside.
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