I've been thinking about the flood we had two years ago around this time of year. Could we get another one of those? It would be worth it if the storm would wash the pollen out of the air. The extra water in the reservoirs and fields and forests would just be a bonus. Being able to breathe normally again for a while would be the best part. For a while this evening it became overcast, and I hoped that perhaps the forecast had been wrong and we'd be getting some rain after all, but it never happened. The days ahead are all to be sunny and warm, and the nights merely cool, and there is little chance that will change. I'll just have to wait until the damned plants run out of pollen, I guess.
The apartment on the other side of my wall, vacant for the last couple of weeks, has been occupied. Someone put up a bunch of fairy lights in the backyard, and there is a big umbrella, not yet opened, but ready to go. A car has finally appeared in one of the parking spaces for the apartment in front, too, so I guess the place is full again. Oddly, I didn't hear or see anything like furniture being moved into the place next door. Perhaps they conjure their furniture and household items. It would be interesting to have wizards living next door. I don't know why wizards would put up fairy lights by hand, though. They probably aren't wizards. They are probably just holograms projected here by aliens. Or something like that. Hell if I know. Pollen has made me batshit crazy. Maybe I've just imagined them and nobody is really there. If so, at least they won't be coming over to borrow a cup of sugar, or some goat entrails, or to probe me.
Time to sleep again, I think.
Sunday Verse
Sleep Positions
by Lola Haskins
This is how we sleep:
On our backs, with pillows covering our chests, heavy as dirt
On our sides, like wistful spoons
Clenched, knees in-tucked, arms folded
Wide, like sprawling-rooted lotuses
In Iowa on top of pictures of Hawaii, huge white flowers on blue
In New York on black satin
In China on straw.
This is how our dreams arrive:
As hot yellow taxicabs;
As sudden blazing steam, we who have been pots on a stove,
looking only at our own lids;
As uninvited insects, all at once on our tongues.
O hairdresser, auditor, hardknuckled puller of crabtraps, you who
think poetry was school, you who believe you never had
a flying thought,
lie down.