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Asking for Water


by Darryl Price


You were no woman at the well. The birds 
all passed looking blackened by the sun. It 

was in your eyes. Mine saw only you standing. 
The pressing sun was a singular 

frying experience between us (and 
I suppose the searching birds). Identity 

was getting harder to come by. But 
everyone knows nothing lasts. You just get 

the exact moment to fully choose or 
forever lose it. Did the well disappear 

that day, stop doing its duty, because 
you had no true heart for it? Why should 

we care? These words can make all the case they 
want, but the main audience still won't stand 

for being cynically bored to tears. And 
neither will I. You probably thought being 

a little tree, no matter how beautiful 
and important, was the same as 

embodying all misery behind 
a pathetic mask of marked-upon leaves. 

There was so much more happening all around 
your head, but every bit of invisible 

to you landscape made the story 
want to give you its real, secret name. No 

woman. No cry. No trust, but all heaving 
shoulders. Isn't that how Bob Marley put 

it? A mountain in the distance. But close 
up, up close, the feeling of going blind.  
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