Connie Wilson at Praire

A place setting and plumes of smoke spread thick across the sandwich bread sky, say stop it, now you know the stars are just another mouse trap for somebody like me. There’s a smear of peanut butter up there. You can just see it from the porch of my matchbox, and on a clear night the smell wafts down like from heaven, and the same breeze puffs up your shirtsleeves so you look like a marshmallow. We just tried to sew our little patch on eternity, the same as anyone else.

It’s no life for me. Waking up to peel back one corner of a nice napkin to pat down the wax around your whiskers, then greasing the tracks beneath your butter dish and hitching myself up to your unwashed matchbox. Waist deep trudging through lint day after day, toiling for a stale and meager sky without a sugar whorl or a single raisin.

Well why don’t you square up to me why don’t you apply yourself, if I just applied myself my life could take on a more definite shape, whereas right now I’m all texture and surface wrapped over itself. I’m more than a surface I’m a plane I’m a connection between you and the things you want and I’ve even accrued a moral charge. Lately everything I do has a moral charge and free associatively I feel plateau with a cliff and a piece of furniture on a downward trajectory but I know what we should do let’s normalize something amazing together. Giftwrap or dazzlecamo always have a secret. Domesticity is like how my mind can’t help but try to make home on any surface that catches my eye. My eye dithers over anything and tries to take pleasure for solace wherever it can find but finds a lot of torture too, and that’s unfortunate.

As far as I could see a lot of what we went through no fault of our own was wrapped up in wishful thinking. Now I’ve made up my burial mound in the upturned bottom half of a butter dish overflowing with the balls of beeswax I gleaned from around the candlesticks. So, whenever I go stiff just roll me in under them and stake a nice napkin over the whole assembly please.

– Uma Payne