I have little to say
I have very little to say about curtains. I can’t talk about them for very long or at all. when
we go out with the blond boy and the blond girl, everyone else starts dropping legos into the
ocean, everyone just starts dropping marshmallows one by one into the ocean.
I don’t want to talk about anything violent, the boy says.
I imagine the ghosts of every person who ever lived holding on to the back leg of a galloping
horse. this horse is nothing you’ve ever seen, nowhere you’ve ever seen, brighter than a miner’s
helmet in deep space.
the blond boy puts the legos up on a high shelf.
a raindrop falls all the way to the bottom of the ocean and looks up. a dark ribbon of kelp waves between the rain and heaven.
given the choice
given the choice to dream or sleep, I choose rocks. being rocks like a quiet. when I write in
bed, I say, “real life goes on here.” real life can be by any water, puddle or ocean. in real life, no
animal is asleep in my arms.
my ex-girlfriend talked a lot about women and money. I pull my books in a pile and read from them randomly, like the internet.
my wandering could be anything within these three rooms. it could be anything by this one window where I watch the dogs go by again and again.
every day, each dog follows a person. every day, the dogs follow people they could easily outrun, looking straight ahead, like a privacy.
ALEX NIEMI is a writer and award-winning translator. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and anthologized in Best Literary Translations 2025. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Elephant (dancing girl press), and her latest translation is The Endless Week by Laura Vazquez (Dorothy, a publishing project, 2025).
