The way I can carry a canary on my finger through the house, you’d think the littlest part of my body was a light somewhere else. I have been able to do this since I was a child. Since I was a child the boat on my head and the whistle in my hip have both fallen and disappeared. They say it’s important for a woman to have balance. She needs balance in order to have grace. That way the boat and the pale white pear don’t get lost. And the plunger neither. The way I can carry pitch black on my lips, the way I can carry a gun in my sleep, the way I can carry bottles all stacked up my spine and a backgammon piece in my ear and the whole gulf of Aqaba on my perfume, you’d say I was a body on a spirit and spirit’s looking precarious. Even now someone next to you may be carrying on his shoulder, a side of beef or an astrolabe. You never know who’s carrying an 1/8” screwdriver in their gut. Look closely. At the body: a place from which thing after thing has fallen. The way I can carry the book of sitting. The way I can carry the book of kneeling. And the way I can carry the book of leafing through over and over. Carrying the farmhouse and the chickens and dad’s clarinet and this desert and the fine night and the TV-murmur and your sleep all at once—they say it can’t be done. You can’t carry the gray roof and the wire coop and the black velvet-lined case and the saguaros and the 5th of November and the boy in the late movie saying he’s gone to make more trees … not without dropping a pear or a gun. And it may be true. Sometimes I sway, and men throw down their pillows. A child carries his bedtime all through his life.

-Beckian Fritz Goldberg