Andrew Borgstrom

photo by Matt Walker

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523 Points

Your skin and the inside of my gardening gloves and the similarities I noted. When you said you wanted to be tied up, and I thought it was the same as saying you had a headache. The workshop we missed that would have taught us the proper way to measure rain. We bought pets the color of fog. The sculpture we made with the bones the neighborhood children kept putting in our mailbox. The insects and days that answered to the same name. Whatever the mailman said when he brought the mail to the door because postal code didn’t allow him to stuff mail into a box of bones. The things Jesus Christ forgot. You loved the way fresh tomatoes looked on clean wool. The cooking class that would have taught us the correct way to skin oranges and lamb. The fishing lures the neighborhood kids hid in the meat. We named your mom after our dog. I will not speak of the unspeakable. I will not mention the word ______. The way I never told you I inherited an Irish pub. And the way I never told you I inherited Irish blood. The way you never told me you were a disk jockey. And the way you never told me you were a disc jockey. The concerts we never went to since you never told me you were a disc jockey. And the way you never told me you were a disc jockey. The canister of razorblades we kept near the sofa. The scarred sofa we kept too near the canister of razorblades. The things Jesus Christ left in the sofa. The way we put the flag up on the mailbox, and the mailman delivered bones to your mom. And the way I would never mention the word ______. I would use plural in place of singular. You would laugh at my plurality. You would tell me we were a disc jockey. We would volunteer our civilian time as disc jockeys. Jesus Christ would remember. I would mention the word ______, and you would laugh. We would laugh at the poor, and they would be healed by the disc jockeys we were. The disc jockey said there was a war. The bones in the mailbox were yours. I made a sculpture out of you and named it ______.

Andrew Borgstrom (http://20eth.blogspot.com) has recent work in Birkensnake, Abjective, JMWW, Hobart and Kitty Snacks. He lives a $6.90 ferry ride from Seattle and is the associate editor of Mud Luscious Press.