The Tip of a Willow

A cigarette causes a fire which causes a cliché. The smoke alarm is making the living room cough. Adrienne Barrios hears footsteps in her teeth. She doesn’t remember where she put Leigh Chadwick or what it means to breathe, or how it feels to taste, or why anything matters when she’s never seen a poet howl at the moon. What she does know: even flames have their own flames. And: even a neighborhood charred is still a neighborhood. The firefighters are interviewing the lack of rain. When did brilliance forget how to weather? the firefighters ask. The day we went on strike, the weather says. Adrienne Barrios sits on the sidewalk and watches the flames lick the windows. She checks her pocket and finds Leigh Chadwick sleeping inside a memory. She wonders how many Leigh Chadwicks have fallen asleep inside how many memories. She imagines many, maybe too many, though how many is too many she doesn’t know. She looks at her hands, her fingers. She wonders why there are only ten of them and how many things can you not count with your fingers because there are only ten? Too many, Adrienne Barrios imagines. She thinks about the flames, and the smoke, and the dreams that will never be dreamt. They are uncountable. Adrienne Barrios feels small, too small—a pebble stuck inside her shoe, a mistake with the boy who liked her bangs, every year that will follow—and then the moment ends and what is left but for Leigh Chadwick to climb out of a pocket and walk into a star.