Carrie Etter

Accounts

Under the till lies a receipt long missed. It is hard keeping track of expenses. There was the wine and there were the words. There was pain in your grimace. One day soon I will go to the pawnshop, turn all my trinkets into spare change.

The Tree

I listened with a child’s anger. His shears, handle end to blade tip, looked the length of my arm. He spoke of cutting limbs to help them grow, and I inched back. He said some of the branches were dead, but I wondered, as he finished his justification and turned to face the trunk, what that meant for the living.

Pink

Someone’s sorrow by the roadside: white daises in pink cellophane. Daisies grow wild in some parts of America, but not here. The grass reaches two inches high and someone visits, someone from a poorer district of L.A., to cut it down. By the next afternoon, twelve bouquets and one teddy bear. Two months later, white daisies in pink cellophane as crisp as though it were the original offering, as though they never aged.

American Collectors

a painting by David Hockney

Pink is a robe is a caftan is a hard line of fabric. Marcia smiles aslant, one arm across her waist. The fabric obscures her feet. Aside, Fred faces the stone sculpture; the shadow of his legs meets it and the shadow of the stone completes the shadow of the man. Green is a suit onto which his fist drips. He squints into the California light that illuminates sapling and totem pole, the pebbled pink and gray pavement, the undeniable curve of Marcia’s fallen hand.

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