\ larkspur

the knapweed opened up today, yawning at the dawn of its infestation, probably bored with how easy it's been to wipe out the bitterroot and larkspur, the latter not so concerned due to its self-loathing habit of sickening anything it touches. the two natives go on about their business in the face of the pending supernovae, jealous only that they won't see the sun slow down the relentless invader, but not kill it, they know, because even now scientists have concluded there ain't no life on mars, only on account of the knapweed done wiped it out, its seeds blown along the solar winds, stuck to the bootheels of some astronaut on a leisurely spacewalk. the rest of the universe now has to prepare for their pretty white flowers and unretractable tap roots. flora non grata.

i check my own boots afore entering the tool shed, not willing to let my concrete foundation crack under the pressure, looking for the tackle box, the opening day coming on. i dried out all the lures last year, but the treble hooks are all rusted still, bored with nothing to do, adhering to enough ambient water to oxidize their complaints for all the world to care. i have a little coin for luck in one of the compartments, a hungarian forint. i'm gonna drop it in the lake this year, see if it drives the fish to the surface afeared of its off-centeredness.

i got these currencies for a girl i knew, and she knew me, too. she got herself a local boy to make eyes with, i tell myself because i fought with her over politics, and the best revenge for when someone questions your geopolitical beliefs is to ride around on someone else's back in her new cowboy boots at a party thrown on your behalf. i kept running into them down in the courtyard without even trying, and each time she'd dismount and project her aura between her and him, like that space between your lungs and chest cavity, that whenever they come into contact it's what the old people used to call a stitch, and these days they say pleurisy. it was painful then, and it's still painful now, in spite of the name change.

and back upstairs everyone kept asking me what was the matter, and i said, 'what the hell does everyone keep asking me that for?' and i went to the bathroom to see if there was some question mark on my face, but nothing i could see. still they kept asking, and i consciously listened to my words and the sound of my voice to see if it was markedly different from before, but couldn't tell. and someone asked me, 'what's wrong?' and i realized it must be the heaviness of the words coming out of my mouth, bearing the weight of their own gravity, disrupting positive magnetic fields, so i spoke more lightly than ever before, tried to breathe my sentences out squeaky high like helium, until they stopped asking their silly, probing questions. ain't nothin wrong, i whispered at the end of the night when no one was around.

she didn't really like him, i said, but truth is she didn't really like me either, so pointing this out during another political argument amounted to nothing more than a pyrrhic defeat. i lost the battle and still lost the war. she kicked some dirt into my eyes on the way out, put some space between us.