David Baker, Why Won’t You Love Me?

10:44 pm, Kenyon

All the houses are sleeping. The grass is full of blond reeds. It’s smooth and tough and bends like my hair when I was seventeen. If you stare at the hay, you can’t help but see a pile of stray farm girls. It’s so quiet. For a moment, this feels like home.

Grass blades strum like violin strings across my ankles. I keep leaning back, inhaling the air, trying to figure out the wind’s smell. All I get is a pile of chipped sugar cones and an old bicycle. The ground is hard. I wish I could tell you some worn out lie that’ll hold our breaths or make us sleepless at the very least. But there’s the grass and there is me.

The field has its own city skyline. It’s a crop that moves from high to low and up again. My thumb is the moon. This is all I have and some nights I just want to shoot dice with an angel.

I’m going home to the fifteenth floor with a sky for a lawn. I’ll stare at my one-sided records. I’ll listen to the musical performance of a 1964 North Dakota high school band and dream of buffaloes and pinecones.

Night is small on the quiet country roads. There’s barely enough room for us, and the stars are quickly turning violet. But hurry. The wind is changing the closer we get to midnight.

            And David. Because the big tree wears stars like a coat, I will answer your question:

                        Lightning bugs are sad.

                        Fireflies burn memories.

                        I can measure the distance with my mouth.