Lorem Ipsum

I think I’m a poet. I’ve been taking the news very hard. I’ve been watching the sunlight filter through the trees and can’t help but cry about how ugly this whole situation is. On Friday nights, the parking lot shitbirds huddle under a Honda Civic and share cold fries. They think of nothing. Birds don’t have to write poems; they just are. A friend of mine inherited a set of embroideries: two cardinals facing each other. Somehow, I manage to know what I shouldn’t: cardinals are ghosts, starved for the landscape. The frames split, and a love letter spills out. I try to stop it, sealing secrets where they belong, but ghosts won’t keep secrets from the living. They’re tired of writing them into metaphors about the flowers, the trees, and the moon. When the sunlight comes again, I cannot escape my private apocalypse: the answer that, despite my efforts, I have witnessed something wonderful.

---

W.C. Perry (they/them) is a writer from Chillicothe, Ohio. Their work has appeared in Meat for Tea, GRIFFEL, Taco Bell Quarterly, Night Picnic, the first BULLSHIT anthology, and elsewhere. To contact this author, burn a candle on a starless night and scream into the nearest cornfield — they’ll get back to you eventually — or if that’s too much work, on Instagram @remotecatalyst.