There are no tropical rainforests in Central Michigan, just the birch and pine clusters that managed to dodge the timber industry. Half the forests are power lines and billboard posts. The reminder alerts begin at 6am because the app doesn’t understand my timezone. Or it does, which is a scarier thought. It’s dark still, in central Michigan, in the part of the state where the squirrels are thin but the crows are fat. Stephanie’s kicked you out of the top 25, log in to reclaim your spot! My family keeps asking what happened to me. Saying I disappeared. Repeating California in disbelief. My dad’s least favorite cousin says I look just like him. I let her cry on my shoulder, her eyeliner staining my collar bones. Gee, it sure would be a shame if you lost that streak now, wouldn’t it? It would be a crying shame and that’s why you should buy some lives. Like the one I am living right now where I have to fish the conspiracy pamphlets out of my father’s coffin before they close the lid. Die Eule. That’s how you say owl auf Deutsch and it will make sure that once a lesson you use it in a sentence. That’s good marketing, ya know. Generally it’s a sentence about how nice and smart it is, nett und klug . Die Eule liebt dich und ist klug und nett und it only takes four minutes. You have full hearts. All your hearts. They only break when you get something wrong. He was 62. The cancer took less than a year. I look at photos of an owl’s skeleton, eyeless sockets, featherly folded wings. It’s not like I expected; it doesn’t look wise or solemn but like death is alarming, a surprise. It’s been 3 days… I have let die Eule down. I’m not logging into my app. I am bulk deleting the emails and the Owl knows. My phone lights up at the Moose Lodge luncheon and someone asks hopefully if I have a boyfriend. How do you say grief auf Deutsch , Duo? How do you translate the turns of phrase that mark a state, a region, a family? What’s the translation of “ohhhhh we’ll be there in a couple three minutes” as a unit of time? Or “Jason’s likely to talk the quacker off a duck's ass”? Do other countries
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