Litany
by Chloe N. Clark
My littlest nephew is learning displeasure
he shouts “I hate this day!” at everything
he can
There is joy in anger sometimes
my friend and I get rage coffee
to talk about work, people, the sky
and how it just won’t cease
snowing, raining, baking us
with sun
With the one I love, we list impossible
complaints: the way that we’ll never
walk on planets other than our own,
how there’s no way to taste the same
tastes you remember from childhood,
how our taste buds regrow every few
years, how we literally grow into some
tastes and out of others, how much that
scares us—but we don’t talk about that
that we grow out of some things, like
children eventually grow out
of extremes—the way my nephew
yells “I hate this day!” until he’ll
learn another way to show this, a frown
or a rolling of eyes but
maybe what I want most is to grow
back into exclamations, into how
we could all go around in our days,
throw our arms open,
to the world,
and know what is around us
Like I might tell someone I love
them so quiet that it sounds like
shouting
Chloe N. Clark is the author of The Science of Unvanishing Objects and Your Strange Fortune. She is co-EIC of Cotton Xenomorph and can be found on Twitter @PintsNCupcakes
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