Colby Cotton

I have seen you bend the pear branch for clipping, your wife press eggshell into the rose bed, and have been envious of the white grid of lattice that stands against your porch steps, how the golden arch of pollen falls through the cedars and clings to your windows. For you have shown me the lacquered deck, pressure-treated lumber, the shellac, and tin ceiling, how the PVC skeleton of plumbing sleeps below the lawn, and I’d like to be like you, but this suburb has found me jobless again, pacing inside a sprinkler system with my head to clear, when I cannot so much as clear freezer burn off asparagus, or cover cabbages in tattered blankets without feeling weepy. I’m trying to be the clean, corporate type, with an IPA sweating in my palm at a brewery I love. I’m trying to understand the turn of a razor along the stubble of my jawline— for there is tenderness, I’ve found, in the dead rat in the dustbin. The nest of bees still wet with poison. Neighbor, I am full of doubt: will the cat ever cease to stare long enough at the sparrows to chase the fly crawling toward the sun on the glass? How will the koi pond learn to cover its face in ice if the ground I’ve built around it is salt? I have spent the night walking the neighborhood feeling absurd, picturing my face on a white cat, and then an owl with its head turned backwards in the sun. I have become what I detest: the oak leaves choking on the pool filter, the lawn mower turned to smoke in the yard— the hard yellow bill of the robin knocking inside the engine.