She wonders why we both can’t inhale properly, all the I’m so weak, all the why don’t I die forced into my nighttime. A throbbing of over and over and good health isn’t what you want even though you have told me you will live to be a hundred and I tell you that you have gained a lucky thirteen pounds since your ninety-sixth birthday and your comeback is, that’s not a lot, I’m so alone here and for me to respond that I’ve lost both my parents would lead to suicide threats tossed at me, casually, pairs of dirty socks. I am a resting place, an old-fashioned hamper, or a washing machine, the top-loader at the bottom of your basement staircase, and when I would offer to save you a trip, two trips, you would troop down anyway, my grandmother-supervisor relentlessly checking, did you turn the right valve, or the left? One set of valves works constantly, the other intermittently and I don’t understand why we can’t work together. Wouldn’t I serve more easily as a machine if the pipes of my mouth stayed fully open?
