Hoffnung

He fancies his chances are good with her, unaware that in the years since the war she has come to prefer women whose cunts taste like mustard. To pin one’s hopes on a bark-colored moth, its wings crinkled like crepe paper, a moth affixed high on the kitchen wall, frozen for days where it will likely die in noble clinging mode just under the cobwebby heating vent, is to confirm your need for more friends and a greater daily quota of sunlight. To raise C.’s hopes that T. can stop drinking and then to liken those hopes to fields of undulating grain, alfalfa perhaps, is to wish C. hip deep in acres of unscythed denial. The blind typist hopes she’ll be hired tonight without her disability becoming an issue. L. said he felt hope’s rhizomes race throughout his body, radiating in all directions, like some incipient disease he’d been fighting since childhood. Hope, he said, it’s as insidious as bitterness. If mother earth only knew how much we loved one another she would creak, shudder, and split like a macheted melon, releasing the fiery ball of molten hope at her core.