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Somehow, I knew the end would come slowly. The luxury and mercy of a catastrophic event that obliterated billions of years of evolution was too much to hope for. The end was the slow boil, the gaslighting of nations, cultures and individuals. It was rich people getting richer. It was the reality of no God, and the belief in one anyway, that ended it all. I am walking with my dog, Ghost, through the former trails of Indian Hill; a wooded path that extends about 15 miles through horse farms and tract homes. She is a Siberian, found along with 4 others, under a black Ford F150 that had been overgrown with tall grasses and moss. It looked like it had been fairly new upon its abandonment, but nature took over, as it always does. I could hear squeaks, mouse-like and weak. I was starving and thought a meal was making itself known. I walked towards the sound, and hence, the truck. I squatted down and peered underneath. The undercarriage of the truck set unnaturally high and I could easily see the old Pampers for Newborns box. When I pulled at it, the weight indicated something alive, and I worried it may be an actual newborn ironically indicated by the package. To my relief, it was four Siberian puppies. They were thin and dehydrated. They peeped and wiggled all the same. I surmised that they were born, and the heart of the human couldn’t bear to take them as much needed sustenance so they left them to nature, or to others that didn’t lack the stomach to eat dog. My backpack on my back and my walking stick were heavy for my wiry 50-year-old frame, so I put them down and wiggled the box, half sunk in the mud, free. I had a decision to make. Take all or just the most viable. Their blue eyes stared up at me; one had an eye so milky and infected that it was just about to fall out. I couldn’t choose one over the other. I was unlikely to be the survivor in my family, who was I to choose in this one? I took them all. I would give each pup equal care and what nature wanted back, it could have. Two years later, only Ghost is left. She has been my sixth sense as I walk along these trails alone, day after day, through the dead and blinding winter, and the humid and disease-filled summers. She barely makes a sound. Sometimes a lone howl when I trek out alone to the bathroom hole. That is why I call her Ghost. It is as though she sees them, too. She alerts; I alert. Most of the time, I can’t see what she sees. Something is there, though, and she knows it for me. It is, right now, winter. I have lost count of the specific days, but I can tell the time of day in a general way and the season. With hunger always gnawing at your stomach; who knows the exact time? With no urgent need to gather ‘round the tube and watch the latest in the dalliances and the made-up drama of real-life debutants, each day is dictated by the sun, or shadow. Time, as a rule, has ceased to matter. We have all ceased to matter. The snow is deep but the tracks of my boots have worn a path in the areas I can safely inhabit without fear of detection. I remember wanting to be noticed. I remember the posts on Facebook that showed my filtered face gazing dreamily into the future. I posted about my children’s accomplishments like they were my own. I posted about anniversaries and memories. People ‘liked’ them. They liked me. Or so one would think considering there was a social contract that demanded cooperation. But here I am and I haven’t seen or spoken to any of those 900 friends I once had. I have a suspicion my children are all dead. All adults and scattered about the former United States; when communication ended, I couldn’t get messages to them. I didn’t dare venture out on foot. I had to stay in familiar territory where I knew the lay of the land. I was sure they’d find me since they grew up here and would feel compelled to come home like stray dogs. They didn’t. I can only assume they are doing what I am doing or dead. Maybe they assume the same. Their father was gone before the first raids. He took his own life in a field behind our house. In his note he told me he loved me, and that there was a bullet left in the gun had I wanted to take my own life as well. He “saw the writing on the wall.” He wanted to end his life on his terms with all the good times intact in his mind. He didn’t want what we had built to be taken. He wrote, “Life with you has been all a man could ever want. I will see you in the next life.” Believe it or not, he was an optimist. Me, I had other plans. “Fuck these people!” I had screamed at my husband after an argument about ‘next steps’. I am a runner. I am not someone who just sits and waits to be a victim. I thought I could get away. Maybe move to another country. This was rash, shortsighted and proved impossible. No flights allowed in or out and crossing the Canadian border; well, that was an unoriginal idea. The quota for refugees was capped and met. Then of course, once America fell, like dominoes, everyone else descended into chaos. I catch myself wondering if Venice is still a thing. After leaving my home abandoned for about two weeks, I returned to find that it had been confiscated by a group of young men. I had snuck around the back and saw grey soled tube socks on a make-shift clothesline and realized another loss. It is the way things are, and I took that chance when I left the house unoccupied for so long. Finders' keepers these days, you know? I made it back down the driveway just before they could see me. I was stuck without my home in the hills of the former New York State all by myself. I had smartly taken the gun my husband put to his temple and found a small, uninhabited shed, and set up a shelter. I broke into homes, stores, unexpected places like abandoned landfills. I did okay. My feet are heavy as I trudge up the side of a hill; the chains on my boots weigh about 5 pounds each. I lift my legs dramatically to take the smallest step forward. Ghost is ahead of me and on a lead. She stays on that lead for fear she will be shot if she gets too far ahead. She looks like a wolf from a distance, and wolves make a meal for a family. Hell, dogs make a meal. So, she stays right where she is at the end of that leather leash. She tugs and pulls sometimes when I am too slow up the hill and she just wants it over with. Sometimes she’s too nimble for me and I fall and tear my clothes on the ice or jagged rocks. Duct tape and ragged stitches map across my pants and jacket. I make haphazard repairs. My husband was the sewer in the family. On one trip to California, our last trip in actuality, I dropped a button off of a jacket I wore to a winery. I had that jacket for 15 years. I didn’t notice the button had popped off but he did. He picked the button up and put it in his pocket. I woke up the next day to him sewing it on my jacket with his portable sewing kit. He did things like that. He tended to the small things. I make a way to the shed. I enter and drop exhaustedly to the ground to take off my boots. My day’s haul has amounted to nothing. I have left over rabbit in the snow box outside. I can have leftovers in the winter because the frigid air and snow make it possible for me to store things outdoors. My son used to force me to watch YouTube videos about the most mundane things, like the History of Ice making. I scoffed at these seeming wastes of time. I now can keep ice throughout the summer. Rest in Peace YouTube. Come summer, fresh fruit and vegetables are plentiful. Sour apples, cherries, and wild carrots and lettuces make their appearance. I am tired already of tough rabbit and squirrel and I am ready for the succulent duck. I will share my meals with my skinny dog. She has stopped begging. There comes a time when even a dog understands that times are tough. The only light I have during the short winter days is the light from the cooking fire. I stir the melted snow and frozen rabbit in the pot. I hum to myself a song stuck in my head. It’s “Judy Blue Eyes” by Crosby Stills and Nash. This time It’s the “doo doo doo” part; my favorite part of the song when I was just a toddler. My father told me a story of when he and his friends, stoned and drunk, would put that song on and watch me dance and spin like a whirling dervish. They would laugh, so delighted by my delight. He said my face was like a shiny, smiling moon. Apple cheeks. It was the 1970’s. The world’s chaos was just a dream to me. I can conjure up that joy, sometimes without the specter of despair looming around every corner. I hear remnants of this song that I recall from times before these. I hear the songs fully produced in my ears. I used to walk around the world with headphones stuffed in my ear canals, listening to mixes and podcasts. I was in a state of constant aural stimulation. I tuned out the world and my children. Now, I am hyper-tuned in to the sounds around me. A twig breaking sends my heart racing. Food or foe? Both require my immediate attention. You can try to tune out the birds or the far away gunshots, but they intrude. They niggle their way into the core of your brain like earwigs. With nothing to drown out the reality, there is nothing but. I think I have forgotten some of the lyrics to this song that springs up in my down time now and again. But the instant images, and times they bring back to me in my isolation, tell the stories of my past and the collective past of the world that has vanished. I look down at Ghost and give her a piece of my rabbit. She almost takes the tip of my finger off with her fervor. I reach down to her repentant eyes and clean the goop from the corners, letting her know I am okay, and that I am grateful for her. I wonder what the point is for the tenth time today. I chuckle and the sound is as though it’s from a far-off place; a place where I danced wildly and had an audience. I am still spinning. When I am done, I put the dirty bowl outside in the snow. I don’t have the energy to clean up. I will wrap the chain around the door of my makeshift shed and settle off to sleep. Ghost and old moldy blankets keep me warm. Maybe I will wake up in the morning. Maybe I will die in my sleep. Maybe someone will overtake me in the night and Ghost won’t have enough energy to protect me. I can’t hope for any of these outcomes. As I drift off, I can hear the Middle Eastern musical patterns of the song and as I fade into the unconscious. I see myself as a little girl… And I hear it… “What have you got to lose…”* * this is a song lyric from Judy Blue Eyes, written by Stephen Stills and performed by Crosby Stills and Nash, published in 1969 ISWC T-070-940-415-8 and not my intellectual property.

It’s rarely too late and never too early, so the sea is rife with heads and hands, each one too eager to claim what they will inevitably squander anyway: loose change kept in a pocket until it gets too heavy or the cute bartender needs a tip. As you wade in at the entrance, the guy at the door acts like he remembers you, maybe does actually remember you, maybe was here the last time you were. Dark and hazy, strobe lights occasionally blinking with unreasonable confidence before exploding in the surge one by one. The walls stay upright long enough to display the work of the locally infamous; a painting with a blowjob face and one with the head of the devil. A table in the corner calls with its nearby bookshelf of board games. You and a friend try to find one with all the pieces before the dice float away, sipping Too-Sweet Somethings because you recently gave up drinking straight liquor for show. An acknowledgment from across the shallow end becomes an approach before you sidestroke back from getting your second drink. “What have you been reading?” You utter the name “Dostoevsky” in the strangely stale semi-darkness, and that alone should have cut the disco track that was playing or at least slammed the fallboard down on the amateur pianist and his entourage drifting a little to your left. A conversation ensues about “The Brothers Karamazov” possibly, a tirade more than likely, and you are somewhere else as always, eyes over waves and lips and shoulders, zeroing in on the back door. Your friend gets cornered, answering questions about her kids. “I’ve always wanted to be a father!” Everyone above water raises their eyebrows in a collective move strong enough to shake the blowjob face off the wall. The sea of heads and hands parts, praises the half-moon, the Bee Gees, and the art of Saturday night, and reforms. The historically untouched cigarette machine provides a pleasant backdrop to the verbal nonsense two inches from your face, maybe three when he pulls back for air then dives in again, no board, no floaties. “I’m going to get a drink.” “Oh, I’ll get one for you!” Two voices shout in unison as you inch your friend forward by her wrist, but the sea is raging just then and you can pretend you didn’t hear them. Out the back door, you accidentally flood the bonfire before it slams behind you. Running past the dick statues, past the moon-bathers, past where the buoyant jukebox fades to a white-noise hum. To the side alley where a metal gate sits stranded between two buildings, likely well over 6 feet tall but after 3 Too-Sweet Somethings, your math skills have dulled. You pull and it’s locked. You try and fail to scale it, cool chain link on your still-wet cleavage, piercing half-moon flickering through your open-and-shut fake eyelashes. As is the way of these things, the only way out is back in. The sea is swelling inside as waves knock pool balls about and further soak the swimmers in the neighborhood’s cheapest deal on PBR. The heads and hands appear to have swallowed the two young men from before. The cigarette machine still seems to rest immobile and emotionless, indifferent to whatever might be happening on the too-plush couch beside it, a texture you don’t generally want to feel on your way in or out of there. In spite of near-constant water lapping, friction left its mark on those reddish cushions, burning and sticky. Low tide; a path opens up and you’re swimming, past the piano player and the blowjob face and the devil and the guy at the door who acts like he remembers you, maybe does actually remember you, maybe was here the last time you were. The street is iced over, filling your lungs with relief cold and cutting, with getting away with the something-sum of nothing, with steel-specked city air just beyond murky seawater. You laugh all the way back to the car. Tiffany M Storrs is the editor in chief of Roi Fainéant Press. She is a writer above most other things, but there are so many other things, and she is properly qualified for none of those titles. She loves a lot of stuff but we're not going to get into all of that now. You can find her here, on Twitter @ msladybrute, on Instagram @ lady.brute, and out back honing her wit.

thing heaven piled errata skinned bones and erotic mystery mags hissing spilling spitting and crawling mounded too tall objects tumbledown furniture upholstery rot and soiled seat cushions decompose towards thing heaven forest before daybreak goodbye, light, ‘til the city is bathed in dawn— for streetlights are branches from great fallen trees— skyscrapers darkened, we fall to our knees as the city, so still, is wrung from beneath. the waning has begun, our lives but pawns— for streets are now paths worn slowly by hooves— in our starlit behemoth of sky as our roof polaris, once stable, starts wobbling south as truth, forsaken, shouts out til dawn— cicadas and crickets shall echo in streets, dramatically trafficless, into the night as it seeps while the city, so loud, is subsumed from beneath— the city as biome, the city as peace.

Try again, they said, as if it were a school exam or a driving test. As if, somehow, there lay at the root of the problem a lack of practice. Some mentioned different options – as if, somewhere along the line, she’d made the wrong choice – and suggested it should be seen as an opportunity to take a step back and reconsider: is this definitely what you want? Maybe it’s not meant to be? But they fucking well had practised, and this was what they wanted. They’d both said so, more or less from when they first realized that flutter they felt on impact might mean a big deal. He didn’t say much after he found the stick, probably still with pee on it, hastily stuck in a vase of mixed, drooping tulips that only minutes before had been partially blocking his view of the television. You’re sure? Yes. Can you believe it? Even though she hardly could; even though the same fear of the same once again was already growing inside her. He’d been gentle that night, with her, with them; not wanting to take any chances. Falling asleep, his hand on her belly, still taut, still keeping their secret from the world. She said a silent prayer to a god she knew couldn’t exist to let this one become a real human. We still have each other and other platitudes, they said soon afterward. The wine-softened syllables of these well-rehearsed lines fell easily out their mouths; mouths that hadn’t met since the familiar outcome was confirmed. Of course, he said, and the hesitation was barely perceptible. And we still love each other? she asked. Always. No matter what, right? Christopher P. Mooney was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1978. At various times in his life, he has been a paperboy, a trolley boy, a greengrocer, a supermarket cashier, a shelf stacker, a barman, a cinema usher, a carpet fitter's labourer, a leaflet distributor, a foreign-language assistant and a teacher. He currently lives and writes in someone else's small flat near London and his debut collection of short fiction, Whisky for Breakfast, is available now from Bridge House Publishing.

Dare not I yet impose an unfit form, Dreaming away at the two photographs Compared (three years apart) with a heavy head. Across the shared driveway, And fenced in silver rings between the great Pine trees, a song of girls’ laughter was heard Often enough, between the Shepherd’s bark. Framed by the rusted screen or chipping paint, A world appeared all overcome by clouds, Call it cloud-dump. They were hanging with pins Above the thin Bear’s Paw, their summits lost (Or just concealed) somewhere in the stratosphere. Matthew James Hodgson is temporarily a high school English teacher at Harlem High School, near the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in North Montana. After completing a master’s degree at the University of Chicago, where he studied psychoanalysis and Romantic-era poetry, he turned to hobbies including printmaking, harpistry, and translating journals from Hungarian to English.

Salem Song October’s losing its dull yellow teeth mother of field mice, queen of chrysanthemum dead flowers clutched in clenched fist in this month of yellow leaves and red sun with smoke wrapped around her shoulders like a shawl It is easy to blame the early dark, the empty cellar, especially when witching hour comes and goes without candlelight we are all so hungry in the market of misplaced things famine of memory, or maybe truth An animal scuffles the forest floor tail tucked into a steel trap the men mistake it for a hairy specter lay down inert and intimate with the dawn bring nothing back but soup bones In the dandelion daytime, children help peddle silver spoons practice bloodletting in case of plague, peeling scabs off skinned elbows singing soft between beestings they get their fill of rainwater and we raise them on ragweed and skipping rope rhymes leave them dreaming alone, three to a bed while we sit in the city center watching the magician’s wife flame into a scarlet flower. Viable Organ After “My Heart” by Kim Addonizio That roll of quarters for the phone call home that three-way mirror in a department store dressing room silver and speckled as the premonition of prophets dream-spangled girl, divine as David that chipped porcelain angel rotting in the rain amongst rhododendrons that list of names stamped in the back of the library book that baby bird buried by the creek bed that funhouse, that freakshow, those twins with two heads— that horror, that headstone, that hole in the damp dark earth— a mass grave for daughters who died with dish pan hands and phantom labor pains, unmarked. The Weight of Skipping Stones Grief takes the stairs two at a time rocks in the pockets of her raincoat, bright pink and borrowed from love, unsure if the next step leads to the river or the road Flash flood warnings sounding over someone’s second-favorite song Car headlights diadems in the summer haze, in this royal procession from parking lot to drug store to stop sign I coronate a Camry, brassy and brave as Diana with its tchotchkes tumbling from side of side of the dashboard, No navigator on, with a wet dog hanging from the window, this is the Princess, bulimic and bewildered I carry it all in my rucksack, because I, like anyone, have a bag and a body to carry it all, still a student, books and browned bottles and broken teeth. I take the stairs two at a time, just as my grandfather taught me, just as my grandfather did before he died, Because time is just at the top, wearing the raincoat of love, her pockets turned wrong side out, all her treasures of pinecones and skipping stones scattered over the foyer, and I gather the sticks and mud and a frog and snail, stay there, so still, on my hands and knees. Laura Ingram is the author of four collections of poetry: Animal Sentinel, Mirabilis, Junior Citizen's Discount, and The Ghost Gospels. Her poetry and prose have been featured in over one-hundred literary magazines, among them Juked and Gravel.

petrology maybe you determined inert at flatline maybe topography never the way you wanted flat water table immersing your mouth pointed nose I studied petrology saw your face in the rock no I didn't no there is another name for this your inch- by-inch erosion without features you are a threat mass lodged so in my throat I can't speak we buried you deep your tongue become marble your brows ossified white of your rendered bone unthinkable our unwavering sentinel where also this registers some level your teeth keep you close now breast of the earth where I unearthly soak in your sublimated sweat acrostic for human-lion relations “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.” -Ludwig Wittgenstein Like any other polite predator, if a lion could speak he’d tell me of dirty water, rusted blood, near-fresh kills to share with guests. Broken bones his cutlery, we’d dine under the sheer string quartet of flies, lie under the stink of meat, blanketed by the hot breath of dusk. Even if I forgot all but the lust of the hunt, a life spent at the tip of the spear, the drum of blood in my ear it's the nights I’d remember - not heat-haze, not the glimmer of summer gazelling away across the savannah. Liam Burke (he/him/himbo) lives in Ottawa, Canada, on unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe land. He is most recently the co-author of 'machine dreams' with natalie hanna (collusion books, 2021) and ‘Orbital Cultivation’ with Manahil Bandukwala (collusion books, forthcoming). His work has most recently appeared in INKSOUNDS, the Daily Drunk, Savant-Garde, the Jupiter Review, and long con magazine, and is forthcoming in Sledgehammer Lit.

Thank you for taking me on long walks to places I had never been before, for telling me the names of all the plants and birds and native species. Thank you for taking me to the beach at sunrise to do LSD and watch the day unfold like a goddamn miracle and then coming home with me and listening to songs and being so so so close. Thank you for turning me on to new artists and playing songs I had never heard and thank you for listening to the songs I sent you because I was feeling emotional and couldn’t come up with the words myself. Thank you for not freaking out when I said “I love you” first. Thank you for listening while I read Mary Oliver poems while we were driving out in the country that day. Thank you for listening to me talk about my ex and my parents and my job and going on and on about all the losses of 2020. Thank you for listening to me talk about the neglect, abandonment and abuse of my childhood, and for being a part of my healing. Thank you for being patient when I couldn’t maintain an erection because I was too wrapped up in my head to have fun sex. Thank you for not shaming me when I did drugs or for that time when I cried because the apple orchards were so beautiful or for that time when I cried because you are so beautiful. Thank you for letting me gaze at you and for letting me live with my hand on your chest and my face in your armpits and your crotch and your ass. Thank you for all those hours of Trivial Pursuit and silly tv shows and heavy tv shows and even Star Trek and thank you for letting me call Star Trek Star Wars because I thought it was cute. Thank you for going to the museum with me and for showing me that Kusama documentary. Thank you for not worrying that someone would see when I sucked your dick that time in the cemetery. Thank you for thinking it was cute when I called you when you were out of town at Thanksgiving. Thank you for all those hot dogs and seemingly random road trips that always went just where I needed to be. Thank you for telling me about the history of Rochester and showing me all the places where trains used to run. Thank you for always finding cool rocks at whatever shore we were on and for letting me pick the best ones to keep. Thank you for being excited about my cat. Thank you for making sure I always had reefer and for always knowing the perfect moment to pack a bowl or roll a joint. Thank you for showing me how to light the menorah and how to play dreidel and for not rolling your eyes at all when I played you the Indigo Girls Chanukah song. Thank you for the Maine t-shirt. Thank you for rice and beans and eggs and toast and all those cups of coffee. Thank you for sitting through all those long talks about how I am not evolved enough for an open relationship. Thank you for trusting me enough to go that art show and thank you for the perfect sex we had after. Thank you for being there when I finally enjoyed giving head and thank you for letting me put my hand around your dick even when we weren’t having sex. Thank you for falling asleep at my apartment sometimes and for not thinking it’s lame when I high five after fucking. Thank you for being honest with me and for not pretending to be someone you aren’t to fit into my traditional ways of thinking. Thank you for calling me special and for calling me “mister” and for always using that green heart emoji. Thank you for falling in love with me and thank you for sharing the fall with me. -TM (12/23/20)

I tell my therapist that I connected with someone. No, I mean we really, unequivocally, like, went together, I tell her. Now they leave me on read, a prickly silence. It takes me 15 minutes to explain not only what that means But what an anxiety-inducing affront it is. She nods knowingly. It’s happened to us all at one time or another. It’s a part of life. When she opens her mouth again, my mother's voice comes out: “Hey, I told you not to swat at the wasps if they fly around you. Wasps sting you!” I want to appear brave, so I swallow hard, taking with it the tears and unsaid words: I know that this happens. I just didn’t know it would hurt this much.

lease renewal what can we lay upon our hands those husking calliopes, generous mouth that leans to yes & tremor, the fold and flutter warmth when the pressing of if & then stains the silk on empty floors settler spreads of grass become a cavalry of arresting blades stranger, you have managed the unnecessary parts of me- carrying them away in small boxes, wrapped against ill humor, hungry mouths of insects, restless ghosts made of packing tape when I move again, remaining will be the fresh wound of a postal code, guidebooks on must see & must do, wild forage and the nearness of hands the blooms in these guides are unencumbered by sweetness, and so they work plying their work under fixed stars velocity of grief in the ache of my arms, I will know grief sure as winding sheets, wrung in bleach the circumference of your shoulders yet wide enough to arrest sudden flight relative speed is accounting through comparison, my body or your body where products of inertia are numb hymnals to praise what remains, what left the polaroid on the table, eccentric orbits with condolences and light receptors the slick emulsion massaged by photons seizing the arc of your lifted hand you are pointing a finger through the frame describing an event already past, escaped I experience the passage of the only bullet that will ever matter coda passing along through a local park just a stand of birch and goldenrod ringed in sodium flood I discovered the final resting place of a wren and gave pause, in a breath before leaving it broken, to trust instead how a strand of lights along the short axis of flesh shapes a luminous host William is a nurse and scribbler of small notes, drifting southeasterly. Further scribbles @ByThisWillAlone.

Eulogy As big as his mammoth body is; Pot-bellied and 6’2”, I still think his presence is bigger. Highly Opinionated, Gap-Toothed, Fun-Loving, Fierce-Hugging, Jovial Salt and Pepper-Bearded Teddy Bear. I never saw how people could perceive him as intimidating; The pieces that everyone saw Towering, Mean-Mugged West Virginan who takes no shit I get it, And it makes sense. But all I could ever see was a giant man who loved me. I wanted to come on here and write something meaningful and powerful, Showing him in the light I always saw him in. Shining glory, Perfectly imperfect. I’m struggling to see the words. I think my brain is trying to protect me. How can you lose a giant? Nothing reverts back to normal after a giant leaves. A giant hole in my Lesser-giant heart. I never knew what my father did for other people. But they were always thanking him. Telling me how he saved their asses. And I beamed with pride with every compliment. I think he was selling them drugs, or getting them odd-jobs, or a combination of both. I just knew he was good at what he did. I am trying to be good at what I do I clock in every day, Feed the cat, Kiss my husband, And do the dishes. My lesser-giant heart does not know how to go on. Stay here as long as you can. I want that to mean the age of ninety-five falling asleep in your reading chair I can’t bear the thought of twenty-seven or thirty-two or even fifty-five. When the pain becomes too heavy I beg Heaven to conjure something right and sweet for you Love and medicine in the shape of a blanket a neural function a rib. I wish for you A reprieve in the light The resounding hum of a box fan lulling you to sleep. I’ll stay pleading with God for A pinch of good in this life To see you through the next day. Like warm strawberries soaking in sugar I want to sweeten your sorrow.

On days like today, I want to be held in silence. No romance. Just friendship and hands, holding me firm and tight till all the anxiety locked in my joints vanishes. This might sound crazy but it is true; I am anxious most of the time but never fearful. Over the years it has become very difficult to hold fear in my chest, there's just no room. Once a stranger asked me to explain to them how they could sense I was very anxious but yet so calm - I could not, it just is. On days like today, I stay in bed, cuddle myself, then rock my body back and forth till I either doze off or feel the anxiety become silent. Slowly but steadily it stills. It never really goes away but I have learnt how to tackle it. I rock my body back and forth, but on some days I wish someone else would do it for me. No romance. Just friendship and hands, holding me firm and tight till all the anxiety locked in my joints vanishes. I wasn’t much of an anxious child, at least not until I started to encounter the world in loud and rough chunks. Events, malls, churches, neighbors, refugee camps, the death of loved ones (one family member or friend at a time) then the growing anxiety became more and more aggressive. It feels as though it has always been there: lurking behind my chest while I spent ridiculous hours reading books and watching archived interviews in my mother's office, hiding itself in the joints in my legs while I danced or played street football with other kids in my grandmother's village, just waiting for the right moment to strike. Every exposure to real life must have been a signal for its madness to turn the volume up in my breath, that's where it stays - I just know. I have taught myself how to manage and still my anxiety over the years, but on some days like today, after reading and writing all morning, pitching and negotiating with survival, avoiding sleep and trying to forget my life. On days like this I wish I could have someone alive in their flesh and bones beside me to hold me firm and tight, to rock with me back and forth in silence till my anxiety stills or I go to sleep. No romance. Just friendship and hands. Water. Steady breathing. Conscious distraction. Silence. Music. Smoking. Writing. These are some of the mechanisms I have used over time to measure how long I have before my anxiety leads to madness.