A Robin laid an egg in our backyard.
We can hatch it; we just have to keep it warm.
Your hair dangles on your shoulders when you run
so you should cut it, or stop running,
or stop running from the storm.
In the Bible, there’s a story about some people
who never knew they weren't living right.
Let’s break the chains we made together,
run into the weather; let the lightning
be our lava lamp tonight.

I tense my thumb over the bottom right-hand corner
of the page and recite a block of text
transcribed from a dead man’s notebook.

A stuttered requiem without accompaniment.

When I run out of lines to botch,
I bow my head politely and leave the stage
before anyone with a list of names and numbers
in front of them can thank me “for showing up.”

Outside, a woman dressed like a carnival growls at me,
or to me, in a language I don’t understand.
The audition sheet she grips prompts me
to point her in the right direction.

I watch her strut from my present to my past,
and neither of us is smiling.
Maybe she’s foreign to this place,
and maybe, so am I.

Tonight, I wait for a man I don’t care to name
to send me an email I don’t care to read.
Somewhere along this timeline, the phone rings
and I neglect to answer it, because what if it’s him again
trying to feed me another USDA-declined beef stock story
about how his laptop keeps powering down prematurely,
not unlike his marriage to a woman who, I’m next to certain,
doesn't care to read his emails either?
Woe is him.
I’m not waiting another night, and evidently,
neither is she.