SHANE JONES
you can't live in the night sky / what her chimney tells me is that she is sad
You Can’t Live In The Night Sky
T told S that they should move to the sky. Seems like a fair enough idea, said S. But wait a second. Are we talking day sky or night sky? T said definitely night sky and S shook his head okay and broke the sun into two birds he threw over the mountains. T and S stood on the roof and raised a chain of ladders into the night sky. S was the first one to go up. He slipped into a pocket of flannel night sky he called a bed. S called for T who was still standing on the roof, looking up the ladders. T placed a letter on each step that formed the sentence I changed my mind. The dog needed to be fed. Letters were needed to finish mowing the lawn. You can’t do these things if you’re living in the night sky. Sometime during the night S rolled over in his bed and fell through the roof and woke on the bedroom floor - a place where S couldn’t smash together the heads of stars or touch the moon in places the moon didn’t know existed.
What Her Chimney Tells Me Is That She Is Sad
I watched for weeks while the woman built a chimney around herself. I slept in a sleeping bag next to the woman building a chimney around herself and when I woke each morning she was higher up. “What’s the point?” I asked. “There isn’t one but to just feel something,” said the woman. A group of violinist came in the afternoon and stood on the roof and played sad songs. The clouds turned dark and it rained a lot. “This is really depressing,” I yelled up. “Then go ahead,” she said and threw down a box of matches with a cover painting of a woman burning inside a chimney. “I said I wanted to feel something,” she said, and the box cover slid open against my fingertips. I looked down and my feet were on fire.
