Nasim Łuczaj

“His wife called me sikorka, tit,as in the bird with the bluehead and lime belly. She tookcare of me sometimes.”

“Have I been hard on you, myself,have I been hard on myself like a pestlein good hands, crushing the required pepper?”

“Every morning since I left you has been still,so radiant and fragrant and free, then turning out tasteless once I biteinto the old tangerine discrepancy between frenzy and dullness. See,I’m your stupid tooth—made explicitlyto break you into pieces. Now I’m unemployed, workingharder than ever. Now I keep a cow tooth in my wallet, for luck, and much more of the whole skullin my subconscious, for some sense ofriddleage in this cosmos, zonesof mystical cartilage, I don’t know,I want to be superstitious.”