100 Words: Drag myself up

Drag myself up, out, across, up, down, over the face of the day. Iron and rust. The seam, visible, between inside and outside on the decayed Nissen hut where a friend plants tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini. I’m a weight I deadlift over the day. Chicken sandwich. An hour trying to draw the Art Institute from a photograph—a lurid lion in the foreground glowing pale gray and green. The walls watch me closely. Rain. Crying. I get the news from poems—men dying miserably every day, anyway. And women. Pretending to be something I’m not. Pretending I won’t decay. The day.