I dusted my father’s old Bose CD-player. It was once white but now it has yellowed like tintype. Do you remember seeing ads for these blocks on the back of PARADE magazines that came with the Sunday paper? No? I guess your family only subscribed to commercial-free periodicals and only listened to jazz. You did mention you learned the alphabet by listening to Cage. Are you feigning a nod? Jeez, I am my mother after all. I’m drinking My Mother’s Favorite Chardonnay. Yes, it’s too buttery and oaky, even for the fourth-wave chardonnay sippers. You say I often do Cathy in drag and that’s why you were intrigued. How could a svelte man in his mid-thirties who once had a promising modeling career compare himself to Cathy! The best part of Cathy was the way she wrote her name inside a valentine. I am so late-to-mid-last century for your tastes, as your tastes waver from the turn of the last century to the turn of the next. You score some hypothetical patient’s wish for another reality. You argue that dimensions collapse on themselves to form another. You seem stuck on conjecture, as if I still wish for dollhouses, recalling Ibsen as formative as the wrought iron that buttressed my family’s crest. We met in a leather bar and I pissed in your cocktail. My punk friend dared me. Why weren’t fashion model dropouts in leather bars more often, you seemed to wince with your eyes. If eyes could speak through wincing, then would we have to fuck at all? I dared you to chase after me to LA, but you steered to Butte. Now, as I speak, you lugged out the atlas to make sure Zagreb is still in Croatia. You’re surprised I know that. I am unimpressed with your translations of Miljkovic. Words are such crushing things.

Spencer Silverthorne‘s chapbook Premium Brawn is a 2017 Bateau Press Keel Chapbook Contest Finalist. He also has work in Assaracus, The Birds We Piled Loosely, Tammy, Title Magazine, and others. He resides in Limpopo Province, South Africa.