fern ovenbird I’ve forgotten that it’s Play_Day. I can’t seem to hold it in my mind. Every year I forget. Maybe because I dreaded it as a child, bored stiff while I was forced to drop clothespins into an old plastic ice cream bucket. Did the school even send a notification? I can’t recall. But it’s Play_Day and my children aren’t wearing sunscreen, which means I’ll have to go home and get it so the sun doesn’t crisp their skin like tender rotisserie chickens, cooking the fat beneath the thin wrapping that holds them together. So I walk home as quickly as I can and I am followed by a man with a spoon in his mouth. I can feel his presence behind me, licentious, predatory. He will scoop out my insides with that spoon, I’m sure of it. He lets the handle bob, hanging from his lips like a cigar (if a cigar was a surgical knife, if a cigar was a cleaver). I walk faster but he keeps pace. Every time I turn to look behind me, he’s there, the spoon clacking against his tobacco stained teeth. I run. I reach the front door of my house (my parents’ house, which is my house, which is not where_I_live), throw myself inside, and lock it. In the living room there is a fern frond made of light, hovering. Fern is the name of the owl that sits on the shelf above my desk and watches over me. Fern is what happens when you sew together the scraps on the cutting room floor and stitch a tiny heart onto a patchwork body. Fern means love (not the kind that scoops you out, the kind that puts you back together) so I eat it, letting all that light slide into my belly where it becomes an extra organ, joining my liver and kidneys and spleen in filtering the filth that accrues through living. It sits next to my lungs, leafy and curling, this fern that is not a spoon. 260103 what's it to you? who go blather from