I’m on my computer in a 100-yo house in orem utah

Joan, a dog, is eating rice and Soy Curls on the floor.

She’s sniffing the floor for rice.

I hear her tiny shh-ing in holes through her licorice nose.

a blue blob on my screen is my sister saying

Mom will pay for half of lash extensions

if you want to try them because I’m trying them

so if you get the $100 one it would be $50

or if you get the $80 one it would be $40

The fan makes a sort of shadowy daisy rotating on the wall,

a sunburst that flashes or something,

a teeny bit of what the fan is doing makes

about 5 hairs on my forehead and nose move

so it feels like a bug with little tiny legs could be perched on one of my freckles

joan sniffing, tiny sniffs, what she does is tiny stuff

we make eye contact, okay her eye contact is not tiny

a little oboe noodling in from kyle’s phone

The fan makes the curtain sway a little,

sort of shift its folds from side to side

This brick is probably globbed from some Utah mountain,

it’s red clay and it seems soft and hand shaped

and the mortar too, human human

The shadow border under the curtain undulates

while the curtain advances and retreats

and Kyle comes up to the windowsill with his airpods in

and he runs a little brush along the windowsill,

scrubs it sort of with a brush and whistles

the fan is drumming, 1 2 3 4, fast, in the next room

the cluck of the string thing with the pull on it.

the fan shaking in its mounting

something humming too, a constant drone, zorked alive and mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Emily Brown is a Californian poet and songwriter. She served a religious mission in Siberia, where she studied Russian extensively. In 2020 she received an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College, where she was a poetry editor for the literary journal 580 Split. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Dialogue, East French Press, Mayday Magazine, and Camas. Her most recent album, A Fish of Earth, was released on Song Club Records in 2020.