Miss Clara Voss from Reno black hat tilted preacher-wrong made a fashion of wearing her dead father’s bolo tie kept saying you’re all nerves Mr. Ray but we crossed three streets to buy matches and pears and she stopped letting the neon find her throat see Mr. Ray see this she knelt on the carpet sorting coins into little moons tipped back laughing with one shoe in her hand holding me there somehow in the blue television light of that Reno motel Where everyone dies Guinea pigging my career. Renting out my body to secure a safe future for the general public to dissect. Lab animals with no future, strung out in hell. As long as the faucet of blood stays on. In a room full of well-fed sapiens, tourists on their way from one guidebook destination to the next. To take a picture of it and forget. And all us guinea pigs believe in it, because we’ve been trained to believe, lies or otherwise. It’s a resume brag in this field. Throw the locks. Swallow the key. This one looks like they’ll scream to stay. To the Comet’s Housekeeper when the compass forgets its north the comet hires a housekeeper to sweep its tail into a ribbon honestly I didn’t apply for this position my grandmother folded clouds into napkins kept it for company she never had a moth undresses the porchlight like it’s slowly making its home there still the orchard keeps a headstone for every apple plucked from its home there are layers of archeology hidden in the marrow of the peach count the seeds, follow the crumbs backward, to the garden lemon rind under the fingernail outlives the argument it seasoned somewhere a housekeeper is filing paperwork for the return of his small mercies the sky, unbothered, keeps the receipt of his waves
Sarp Sozdinler is an Amsterdam-based writer. His work has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Wigleaf, HAD, Hobart, X-R-A-Y, Burial, and Pithead Chapel, among other journals. He serves as the editor of The Bulb Region. He can be found online @sarpsozdinler or at www.sarpsozdinler.com
