![[ a boy in the woods]](/images/b/boyinthewoods.gif)
We look to a lake, into the water and inside, underneath sage, pine, ripples, his eyes. Back again our boy and he looks at himself looks at himself looks. Eyes ten eleven twelve. Our boy. Inside rabbits scattering and a pocket knife opens. Mountains, sky. Boy eyes in a lake, the water fish breathable, changeling in ripples, side brow weeds and snow covered above altitude. Thin bubbles release from the bottom, tip and waver to the surface, the breaking. Bubble break into the our eyes, we. He looks at himself looking at himself looking. Eyes and unbreakable boy. Our we.
There is a girl, flying, rowing in clouds, the depth of sky, the blue. The blue is her mother's iris, the nodding head of her father, the movement of yes yes yes, the reciprocal no no no. There were no words. A girl never born, imagined now in the sky, the blue, the clouds. This girl, flying. Rowing oars in sun, sky. Windless air. And her father dying in a bed with a cough, coughing, her mother unknowing of it all, walking down their dirt road, the same dirt road with the nodding yes man, the man who is dying, this would be girl's father, this would be girl's mother, them all disconnected and separate, spacing apart, flexing their distance. There is no man on the road the woman sees, gone to imaginings, like the girl in the sky, imagined, unreal, gone.
A towering of branches and a man holds those clouds to the side, peers through night darkness and the stars, the moon over his shoulder. The man looking in windows, the neighborhood of his mind, watching infants asleep in cribs, infancy under the handmade blankets of grandmothers. A man leering looking, sifting through the ash flake of memory, children playing blind-fold games and swinging parched bats. A man shattering under the watery weight of those livable moments, movements, the brush of clouds on the slip of his neck, the stars lurching behind him as he looks, doesn't find, continues searching.
Tip mountain top our boy's shoes and the toes coming through. Feet his feet we have a thousand million hundreds shoes and infinite feet and we can drink from them and he is parched, our boy, shoeless and toes coming going out. Our us never stops coming going out. We made a basket and imaginary fish leapt to it and we cried holding a basket of invisible fish squealing and the delight and the drop of sun. Water imagined us we imagined our shoes so many shoes too many shoes because us and our boy our no shoes our toes.
J. A. Tyler is the author of the forthcoming novellas Someone, Somewhere (ghost road press) and In Love with a Ghost (willows wept press) as well as the chapbooks The Girl in the Black Sweater (Trainwreck Press) and Everyone in This Is Either Dying or Will Die or Is Thinking of Death (Achilles Chapbook Series). He is also founding editor of mud luscious / ml press. Visit: www.AboutJATyler.com.