Exercise in Negation —after K. Iver
Marissa Davis It is not winter. There is no dog. No dogs, no daughters. No— there has to be a daughter. But no dog. No winter. No backyard, no broken back door slamming. The door glides tactfully, with immense discretion, ideal for a house decanting lies. But this house has none. Or it does, and she doesn’t know them. The daughter. The daughter, who has never spoken a word in her life, not even her own name. In perfect silence, nothing breaks. Not a door, not a marriage, not a family, not a crabapple branch gagged by frost. There is no frost. No winter. High summer, a backyard—fine—a backyard achingly alive, a loud wet sun, the subtropics’ raving Janus face. A climate leaking the precarity of fiction: a slice of raw wind, a season that never mattered. Any season, the teen deer amble in the ragged woodline, stitch the pines’ blue shadows with their mothers. (Where is her—) If she went outside, the dog would chase them.