If I wrote like a smoking man on a motorcycle,

perhaps then you would think I was brilliant. I

staple the facsimile of the couch back together,

protect the innards that glut out, cover the

opening the cat tunnels into, his secret mole hole.

I shampoo every fabric chair in the building, eight

hours, soaked, lathered, sucked clean down in

white lines. I watch the dirt evaporate like a whole

crop on fire, how much dirt could you pull from

one surface, there is so much hidden beneath what

we do and it’s always someone else’s job to take

care of it. At lunch, we drive to the rocky

lakeshore outside the gates of the nuclear plant,

near the place where his father once worked in

the wire factory. It was a secret, at the time, that I

wanted more than this. I found satisfaction in

cleaning and the way it exhausted me. Excising

everything so people could pretend it was not

there. Mardi gras beads. Fuzzy handcuffs.

Intelligence is a secret knowledge that people die

for mistakenly, and then the roof leaks. Dark

stains. Nothing easy.