Of late, all creatures
including most insects, excluding most
people, are almost impossibly precious
to me, the dispassion of suffering
we inflict on us almost unbearable:
carpenter ants my housemate
feeds a mixture of borax
and powdered sugar curled fetal
in one another’s mouths; earwigs
striving out of torrential
rivulets in the shower, washing
out on their spineless backs.
Nightly I dream of abandon-
ed dogs and comb the local
adoption listings for one
the size of a human
newborn, one I could carry,
even if I couldn’t walk. A thousand miles
apart, the geometer
& I
text each other from bed the bad
puns for which I adore him,
but he can’t make up his mind
and can’t not. I remind
myself love is not
love. What besides
the heart works its whole
life until it stops?
Genevieve Arlie is a tree-hugging Californian with chronic fatigue syndrome. Her writing and translations appear in St. Petersburg Review, Flyway, Columbia Journal Online, Waxwing, Nat. Brut, and Passages North, and on The Adroit Journal blog. A graduate of the Iowa translation MFA, she's also a PhD student in English–creative writing at the University of Georgia.