Squeaking On

A camera occasionally caught us sealed within album leaf’s ten years, twenty years later; folios still fastened to a distant past. I don’t miss you, and this is not a love letter. Too many cuts with thin edged blades; invisible lacerations that nonetheless bled into words, and those words hemorrhaged. Last night, in the backyard, a mouse died, but before it did, it called out to the owl that killed it: Better to die now, then as a small squeak, only wounded, damaged just enough to bleed on, inside a memory of what once was.