Little Shields, in Starlight
by Carl Phillips
posted in Literary Hub, 2022
Maybe there’s no need for us to go anywhere more far than here, said the dogwood leaves, mistaking speech for song, to the catalpa leaves, imitating silence. It was like sex when, push the tenderness to either side of it, it’s just sex; hardly sex at all . . . Hardly worth mentioning, except forgetting seems so much a shame, lately, and why
shouldn’t there be records, however small, of our having felt something without for once having to name it, I know what my dirt is, as if that were enough, might well even have to be, to have moved mostly with the best intentions, at least, before we stopped, that’s all that happens, I think; we stop moving forever.
