Goodlord. Goodlord. Goodlord.
I can’t breathe.
No, I’m breathing – just
my breath is short, Ava,
as though I’m drowning.
Not the cave, forget the cave.
There are these buses –
minibuses
that park outside our window.
Between their jobs the drivers sit there
on their phones, engines idling away – oh, this idyll
that you rent us, Ava!
…chug chug chug
Each morning I take my coffee to our modest window,
watch the buses park and re-park down below like
livestock grazing out beyond the ha-ha.
Sometimes the drivers piss against the wall just
over there – so oft’ I’ll see a dick emerging from a
tracksuit like the season’s earliest mushroom.
Do you know, Ava, how bad these fumes are for
your lungs and heart and mind? I didn’t until last year
when I read about it on my phone and as I read my chest
began to tighten, and I felt the last near-decade of those
buses chug-chug-chugging crushing in.
Before I read that article I felt fine, Ava.
It’s reading that’s the menace, not the fumes.
Now when I hear that chug chug chug
my breath gets short,
Am I dying?
I mean –
am I dying faster here than if I lived in some
well-lit, well-built, well-ventilated house?
A garden out the back –
a garden at both ends, why not!
chug chug chug…
I’m at war with them.
The buses –
of course I am.
With my Post-it notes,
my firm agitation of the blinds,
