Mine and no

"Remember Lot's wife."
--Nixon to Kissinger, all the time

They took out the geese that lived on the lake in Prospect Park, without telling anyone, so that when she next entered the Park, she thought she'd been struck deaf. And then he explained how the geese had been skimmed off the lake, and the cicadas shook, loud as maracas.

Now the bag of stale bread sits heavy on their table.

Like a shop in the former Soviet Union on a cruelly appointed weekday, her soul is closed for accounting. She is vicariously homesick, on behalf of the geese, who flew their final V unwittingly, and who will no longer stand on one foot in shallow water, gazing at the opposite shore.

Unlike in spin class, the mountain is real. People are not buying ringtones of late, reports the press, and there is a needle stuck in the Gulf, and the sometime governor of Illinois used to hide in the bathroom when his deputies came to relay bad news about the state's fiscal condition.