[twenty-one days]

It’s been twenty-one days since our run-in with those daylight thieves. For our part, we’ve been in conference with the slowing rain of leaves, the seemingly-ever-wet earth, some artifact of it we wipe from intermissioned boots. That, or the tattered crunch of acorns playing about the backyard’s mouth; our own mouths run damp with fog and coffee, damning and blessing the weeds of this dimension between coarse grinds. The rooms closing in on our garden, the hours, years, warm days that court a chilled patina. Our fruit ripens in due course here; our baskets, stuffed, fingered daily, tasted, given praise. Outside, we spy between kudzu vines a cruel, icicle life: the hurt on side-streets signed with auto-pen. Food crumbs priced like emerald dust. Ten thousand reasons dressed in tar pit suits to dream of some other world. To eye a flame for this one.