Inside Stories

Science or story or just the unfolding of the sound of the syllables:

I telephone my collage roommate whom I have known for forty years
but haven't seen for probably five. She whispers almost without effect
of the stage four cancer in the lung, near the heart, of her third husband.

There are scientists about whom whole plays are being written today.
There are dusty orange petals like tied tongues trapped behind our girlish
ears. There is the sound of no sound to know how to respond.

The confluence is profile, mine, and straight ahead stare,
hers, heard through the wires of San Diego tributary electricity finding
me in Santa Fe near a dirt rodeo, with all the things I could say.

Dogs and cats and no rain. A heat spell on her coast. My husband
plants displaced yucca spears in our side yard, willing them back to green
from cantaloupe grey. And I hear myself saying to her "he's doing to die"

as if she didn't already know this. And I prescribe wheat grass, carrots
juiced, medical marijuana as if I have a penny of a clue. I write
them both a postcard this midday, a blurry photograph of miniature erotica

plastic figurines. A small naked woman with black pubic hair standing
with both hands on both hips, defending her right to simply sun bathe
in her own backyard without a care.