By Jack Myers

Featured Art: Houses at Murnau by Wassily Kandinsky

Memory in her drab gray dress was the first to arrive.
She sat there bored, with nothing to remember,
so she talked to herself, her mind streaming
like a black-and-white dream full of words.

Upstairs, Regret circled and circled her mouth
in hard red, ironed the wrinkles out of an old
embarrassment, and doused herself in lavender.

After humping Memory’s leg, Happy
rolled over and over, his little thoughts
like the insides of a Scrabble box.

Hard Work trudged downstairs
to the basement to soak and snooze
in the anesthetizing glow of the cathode tube.

Part of me was there too. The omniscient narrator.
A you without a mouth. A mist of a face
in a black-on-black painting.

The rest of me, never having tasted or seen
or heard or been held before, was about to arrive.
Everyone cried and was glad somebody had the chance
to be anything again. That was the occasion.