Futility

You wrote novels, political ones, wielding the

paragraph like a dangerous weapon. “They

should keep their damn hands off our lives,”

you’d say to me when I got home. Greasy hands,

stinking of fish.

The owner of the Chinese Laundromat can

neither read nor write our language. He looks

through a newspaper like it’s not even there. He

keeps several spider-webs in his windows, to catch

the flies, he says, and to add a little decoration. Once he
showed them to me, one midnight when I found us
walking down the same ink-stain street, alone together,
the stars like tiny holes a child had poked with a pencil.

But now, it's one a.m. Your writer's block has returned. You could

understand none of it, you said. The computer screen
was a vast arctic wasteland, and you a lost explorer.