Bread and Jam for Frances is Delighted to Welcome "Don't You Have Map?"

Don't you have a map?
A collaborative, traveling essay in letters
'twixt Erika Howsare & Jen Tynes.

Part 9, E to J—

Leafing out, it throws out. Oops—my image for this link. Mistaken, I toss it, rambunctious, winding down.

(No one wrote.)

Take a hike. Take a knife, a large body resonating a relaxation. Muscles slack in the heat. Tension of bridge line or letters, squeezed, then dropped. Imagine that celebratory dinner that was slipped off a chair or specialized or missing you. The thing is no one probably goes back and forth.

(No one wrote.)

I’ve been writing all day like a friend and an advertiser. Really not that ambitious, but out there pushing wheels back and forth, forgetting the top of the wheel, a peak. Just making rows; none here; do you participate in traffic? Is it just electricity? Because it’s lost, I also forget how complete it seemed, spilled out in a hurry, as is. Which is exactly what we have—a six-month hurry. Look deeply between the leaves. Or reach in with a stick. It might not be the right time, as in schedule, or it might be wrong as in after. So we’ll paint the outward push from the chest while depending on a tree for protection. Looks like they dug it up for replacement. Once upon a time they made it officially pressed and licked, off-schedule, canceled for heat reasons. At the moment my outline is compromised by flies.

(No one wrote but someone said he was not interested at first.)

Yet I insist on listening to birds half a mile away, and tracking the downtick of temperature naively. When it becomes that nothing matters you know you are south. When they arrive like boats you are ignoring their manners. They chew and are valued singly more than I’d expected. Their flanks are soiled, buzzed. There are five on me. And I would not say we had gone very far except later. Recently she killed two birds with one moan. “There’s a poem in there,” a worker said. Among grasses, or “she opened her mouth, finally/ to release the bird,/ and its mate fell out behind it.” We could both do that. But we easily don’t, we go around it, swishing flies off with our tails, lumbering.

(No one wrote and this is a flooded dam.)

That gasp that comes at the “end.” Where is materials, here? “There has to be a message” was one I received, not on this frequency, but I remove and recreate it here for you. So no more calibrated worry. Love.

J responds to E at TBA in about two weeks.
Please visit http://www.horselesspress.com/amap.html for the whole hog.
Email Erika & Jen: editors AT horselesspress DOT com.