By noon, the winds fail. The lull 
will mean experiments like this 
will have to wait. We'll have our tea 
and talk of nothing, just to pass 
 
the time. I'll say, I know exactly 
what you mean. But I am here 
and not here too. I see outside 
a shape that's missing from the air 
 
that is my shape, or my misuse 
of sight, since nothing like a world 
appears. There's just a kite.

THE TETRAHEDRAL KITES

Like a hole in my head, I need. And this is part of the problem these days. The incessant demands and desires for things I shouldn't need—these odd obsessions and unmanageable thoughts--and how they carve out a space in my head like the small rodent who nests in our attic at night. I can hear him skittering around in my skull when I wake, anxiety-ridden at 3 am, worried about an email I didn't send, the balance in my checking account, my inevitable loneliness, or whether my wife still exists. Sometimes I'm so far away I don't believe she is even real until I reach a hand out in the night to touch her, pushing through the veil of distance between us, letting my palm cup the round pajama-covered curves of her bottom. Some days this is as close as we will get. Some days it is all I need. Other days I never bridge the gap. 
 
I would make a terrible Buddhist. I don't know how to turn off the voices. I am made of desire. I need you to understand this. And some nights, I don't know if the mouse in the ceiling is real or simply a manifestation of my generalized anxiety.

TREPANATION (WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW)

Now I live in a fancy town with a fancy university. The people here have never tasted country ham. There is a path along the lake where these healthy wealthy people jog and walk and talk. Boy, do they talk. I admit I like the lake, too. There are even deer here, and these deer are not afraid. They are very slow to move from the path when they see you coming along. They even look at you with what seems like disdain. Yes, I know that's anthropomorphizing, I tell the disdainful deer.

DECREATION

If you have lived for forty years in a variety of geographies all featuring a preponderance of grim, overcast days, you may not realize how much your sense of joy is based on sad weather. How your nostalgia, your ease, your sense of being at home in the world all depend on the constancy of cloud cover, perpetual dusk, and the general withholding of light. And if you move elsewhere, say, a place that is technically the desert with far less than ten inches of rain per year, where there is rarely a puff in the sky, and for nearly half the year it is 100 degrees, then you have lost your sadness which is a terrible thing to lose. Truly displaced you are, rootless, and with little reference for your interior life, you can close your blinds, blanket up the windows, but the light will seep in trumpet-blaring from pre-dawn to the last possible blast before the sun godfully goes down.

TUSK

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ANDER MONSON

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The Secret Lives of a Tall Man in a Special Coat 

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"My mother feared the plague, feared long tails and large testicles."

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My mother feared the plague, feared long tails and large testicles. I'd send pictures to her, proud of my new-adopted friends.

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