scent of the day: Nose Rest Day
*Let's workshop this poem about a man apologizing to the girl he used to pimp out, the phone call becoming a joke for years to come when—after letting him go on and on—she asks if he still has work.
Arc of Redemption —for my cousin Randy
He apologizes for pimping her out back then (“I was a stupid-ass kid”)— her silence easy
to read, against his choked-up plea, as sacred, as the lost-for-words dawn of healing—
but she ends the call with “I mean, tch—real talk though. You got work for me, right?”
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)
