Michelle Y. Burke

A man can give up so much, can limit himself to handwritten correspondence, to foods made of whole grains, to heat from a woodstove, logs hewn by his own hand and stacked neatly like corpses by the backdoor. He can play nocturnes by heart. They will not make the beloved appear. He can learn the names of all the birds in the valley. Not one will be enticed to learn his.

That she was not pretty she knew. The flowers delivered into her hands post-concert by the young girl, pretty, would be acknowledged only. To display was to invite comparison. Skilled at withholding, she withheld; it was a kind of giving. As when meditation is a kind of action, a way of leaning into music the way one leans into winter wind, the way a mule leans into a harness, the way a lover leans into the point of deepest penetration. After a ship’s prow cuts the water, the water rushes back twice as hard.

Quilt voice into flat prairie land. Swell stature into argument. Carve wrongdoing into wood chips, easily digestible. Engage in preemptive fork removal. Do not be implicit. Silence, a coiled threat. What’s in your holster? Separate the child from the chaff. I mean, spoon the cream off the top. What do you mean you don’t have a holster? Keep the curds. Discard the whey.

You love your friend, so you fly across the country to see her. Your friend is grieving. When you look at her, you see that something’s missing. You look again. She seems all there: reading glasses, sarcasm, leather pumps. What did you expect? Ruins? Demeter without arms in the British Museum? Your friend says she believes there’s more pain than beauty in the world. When Persephone was taken, Demeter damned the world for half the year. The other half remained warm and bountiful; the Greeks loved symmetry. On the plane, the man next to you read a geometry book, the lesson on finding the circumference of a circle. On circumference: you can calculate the way around if you know the way across. You try across with your friend. You try around. I don’t believe in an afterlife, she says.But after K. died, I thought I might go after her.