Black Bread

There’s a sound in your head and it’s driving you crazy

You complain to the photos, but it doesn’t matter and then you start feeling guilty for things that happened somewhere unexpected in the night

Skin and face close over an African hole like a book in your bag and you’ve carried it your whole life, reading from time to time, trying to see where the plot falls, hoping the end is good enough to warrant the effort

You know the end

A fly lands on your hand

It’s wearing six high heels and four thousand pairs of sunglasses

You flip it away and turn on the light to write an email

The dark edge tells you to stop like a cop on the sidewalk and you do, because strangers and friends have no interest in things without meaning

You remember the woman who carried her dead child around for a few days thinking he was still alive and then she laid him down with the tigers in the green grass and walked away

The sun sank and people ran through the field screaming and you thought that maybe you could send out an email to strangers and friends and it would skip along the moon’s curve and somewhere they would find unexpected meaning in things that happened in the night

Always the night, thick as a slice of German black bread