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Love Equals Catastrophe

There is a little boy out in the backyard with five lit sparklers in each hand. His outstretched arms tumble and spin in a fit mimicking an airplane's wings before the crash. The temporary flurry of colors extracted from burning magnesium alighting on his face like psychedelic moonshine. Each boyish warcry disappearing into the evenings shadowed treelimbs like the emitted tufts of gossamer smoke. The hiss of each burnt out stick plunged into the humid dewy yard green marks the closure of this holiday in his tender mind.

The train on this hour calls its distant solemn note like a woman next door warming up for a voice lesson.

For us it is enough to listen from inside the cool dark of the house to the pleasant pound and boom of a cross-town fireworks display. We hide in the womb made of blanket and mattress, where your light is a dark constant. My orbiting thought a misshaped continent. Alone and naked and urged on with patient time.

You make me ache for art so. I feel like a woman for whom pottery was her life and her creation. And perhaps in wanting so to be at one with her medium she climbed into her own kiln to be made alike, her glazes hardened into art. Structure repurposed, reconstructed, reloved. This is the definition. If you can avoid love, you can avoid catastrophe. For perhaps even the boy will come again barefoot into the backyard, and step hard on the metal slivers, acquiring pain by what once gave him joy.

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