Charles Freeland teaches at Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio. Recent work appears in Jubilat, Cream City Review, The Hollins Critic, and on-line at The PedestalMagazine.com. A chapbook, Where We Saw Them Last, is forthcoming from Lily Press.
We are in awe of the cone snail. Once we’ve been informed of just how poisonous it is. But we are not likely to fear it for the simple reason that it doesn’t live anywhere near us. At least those of us who prefer the continent to those places where the continent disappears into the surf.
I’m sure the habit of endangering everything you own and everything you are (a telephone pole repairman, say, or a Mickey Mouse criminal, the kind that boasts of having stolen things he couldn’t even lift) is one few of us would wish to break. If only we were so lucky as to know what it means to be in love that way and not think it a silly aberration.
Whatever’s at the root should remain constant. Its precise identity, though, isn’t that important. Ask the man who cleans the office windows. Who hangs above the street like an idea in someone’s head. He knows the balloons used to represent thought in comic books are designed merely to take up space.