Everything is interesting. I believe that.
I believe that while listening to men settle a territorial dispute over an armrest
on an airplane which tunnels through an open cloudless sky
and I believe that while touching plastic coated windows
already finger-rubbed by so many other people
who have sat in this economy seat at some other place on the planet.
I believe that while noticing the crooked crumpled shape of farm fields
as if the world were glued together by a thousand toddlers
who cut circles and squares from construction paper and called it geography.
And I have done stupid things with my life.
I remember this during a lunch tray of sandwich and cut strawberries.
Strawberries,
which I begin to eat extremely slowly with my teeth
by extracting a single green and white seed from the artificially ripe flesh
and then another,
as I hear the laughter of friends outside a wooden yurt several summers ago
on the Oregon coast in June
where I saw Emmi eating a strawberry in that same way,
by using her teeth to pry a single seed with every bite
until there was only green leaves and pulpy red stump held between fingers.
Of course we were on drugs.
I had forgotten that until just now.
And I think it’s interesting
how I’ve tried to eat strawberries like that ever since
Without realizing that I was an actor
who memorizes their scripts until it becomes them
and I must have memorized my favorite parts of other people
to have lived so long
without realizing that my most absent gestures are stolen
and just like that episode of Deep Space Nine
where Vantika hides inside the mind of Dr. Bashir
in a vain and callous attempt to live forever
while the crew struggles to discover who of them is compromised,
I have not yet discovered all the pieces of you
still waiting in me.
Zachary Cosby’s work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Pool, Omega, and the Portland Review. He is an editor of Fog Machine, a journal and poetry press. He lives in the Republic of Korea.
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