Yearbook (12.3)

Sore eyeballs and stiff muscles of the couch sleeper. “Soviet Mario” mushrooms. “A green mouse sneaked through the moss.” An oolite in graphite in studious fig light, clinked against and crunched across by a ringing pick into alder scrub light. My ostensible place, a problem arises, a giant invasive iris, is with the cold pizza and sweetish tap water, the things you say and do, the old stencils crusted with flecked orange spraypaint, the ados of ordinary day through fog, the lowered plummet of final attention, sore eyeballs and stiff muscles of the couch-sleeper. The sky is bad with architecture, and I have been reading everything—“Taste the delicious Bubble Teas of Bubble Island,” “A Race to Save a Brain”—but it isn’t working. We hiked out of Moscow through the woods (acacias, blue-and-red newts) to an old man’s apartment where we ate dinner (cookies, then soup, then reheated tea) and I had to speak some Russian, which went okay.