He Could Not Sing

He could not sing worth dimples but she let him anyway because he paid the water bills that furnished all their showers. Echo chambers lease themselves to vocalists with appetites to match the butter knives and drapes, the carpet and the patio, the lacy trees with verdigris alert for photographs. A piano for the photographs of relatives unhappy with their fate whatever they might choose to name it. He could not sing worth contents of confessionals in parishes they'd left but she was game for all the notes that sounded tongue-in-cheek. He let them rinse themselves out of the sacrament they were with condiments and vague connections to another earth. He could not sing a capella until midnight wore itself to dawn. When she would hear him ruining the house with what she wished were trepidation but resembled much more closely self affection brightened by the signals he'd received. He could not sing worth unemployment checks that he would never greed. He loved his weight and exhalation. And he loved to hear the evidence of having shucked his childhood with affection pinched out of the Tupperware and all the breath gone from the fresh mint leaves and chicken broiled just right. He had no inclination of a way to celebrate the lime or oven or the toasted light.

Irreverence, a pilot light sustained by the amendment of some purity recovered from the lost and found

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Sheila E. Murphy | Fulfillment Center
Contents | Mudlark No. 8