1.

Miss Gloria wore a blue dress spangled with bright white stars. I hoped the constellations might glow in the dark, but I never saw her in the dark. I didn't see her late one night in the preschool's lot when she slipped on ice and broke. But when a week later she came back with a cast, I imagined that map of stars aflame, crashing down to rocks with a scream. Her lesson that day: The little dipper's just the stomach of a bear, a nice soft spot for my fiancé, a hunter, to put a bullet through.

2.

The rocks I found underwent a change. I'd place them in the magic box, turn a crank. They'd tumble down a chute as gems. I liked them for their shape, all sharp points and edge, and their color, as deeply blue and violet as the church's stained glass Mary. But a neighbor boy revealed the lie. My cache of ugly pebbles filled the box's upper deck, and in a separate tube my unreal beauties waited to deceive, just cheap plastic, and look, he could crush them beneath his soccer cleats.

3.

None of my friends are afraid to go outside. None of my friends are afraid to drive. That's the tree where one of them died. That's where through glass we watched a bare wrist slide. I've got a friend who never wonders if all his friends are dead. I've got a friend who doesn't think good sex once means he'll die in his bed. He crosses streets. He rides a bike. He's barebacked in a barn on someone else's land and walked back to the highway at night. He'll paraphrase Leo Bersani paraphrasing Bataille paraphrasing Freud and mean it: "The self is a sanction for violence! The self which the sexual shatters provides the basis on which sexuality is associated with power! The rectum is a grave where the masculine ideal of proud subjectivity is buried!"

4.

Me: I watched a movie once, and what's life been since but the slow draw back of a bathtub's curtain. Every night I find a body bleeding there.

5.

I want to learn something about the friends and family of road kill. Rabbits don't raise roadside crosses beside bodies In Memoriam. Squirrels don't balm guilt with God after sending mom across the street for snacks. But we can't know for sure. Do they mourn? Miss? Or merely wonder where their lunch is? A bump beneath wheels sent me searching.

6.

Angela from YouTube posted a clip and 30k have viewed it: "Squirrel Mourns Death of Friend." One stiff squirrel lies in the road. Another, its friend, sniffs the neck of the dead. The camera zooms a bit. The friend climbs on top, "as if to hug his friend in grief," Angela captions... Doesn't she see him thrust and writhe? Charitable read—all men, even squirrel men, think their cocks give life. Or does this little fucker know the body's a lie and transcend it? Maybe he screams in squirrel-speak, "Our spirits shine brighter than thin grey fur!" Then, a mansplain for the ages. One commenter puts it simply, "he may know his friend is dead, but the urge to mate is stronger."

7.

Love is one more box of gaudy good crystal that someday you'll have to bubble wrap.

8.

Every Heathcliff hopes his Catherine nightly haunts the moors. When she came back shouting, "I'm home, I'm home," Lockwood, lonely traveler, gentleman, saw in the window "a child's face," but still grabbed her hand and rubbed it raw "to and fro on the broken pane" until ghost blood soaked her ghost bedclothes. Blame Heathcliff, who exhumed the grave, wanting, with Catherine, to "dissolve." I dreamt my friend and I went out in the yard, into the Pacific's fog. We wore his late sister's gowns, let sequins shatter the moonlight's glow. We warbled and pranced along to Kate Bush. Come home, we shrieked and laughed, come home. It's cold.

9.

I left this out: while the friend fucked, the body shook, alive again, a granted wish! But whose? I don't fear fragility anymore. What I fear is not the way we'll break, but the cruel desire, arising from loss, for the endless, violent, insufficient reanimation of self.

10.

I do think there's something lasting in the times we come apart, but I do not know if it's nice, I do not know if it's bright. Don't let our lovers try to wake us. Enough with preservation. We'll catch more light in shards.

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