No more sky, I can’t—

          Oh, stop it, you’re fine.

          But this hot horrible sky.

          You should love summer! Everyone does.

          I want summer to die.

          Summer’s when we drink frappies and wear chinos. Play some Ultimate.

          My thighs hurt and I’m frightened.

          Look, a carousel—inside Starbucks!

          I’m going to kill summer.

          First put your thighs on that carousel. How adorable.

          I think a lot of people hate summer, secretly.

          Have you ever actually thrown a Frisbee?

          Not even secretly.

          I call the ebullient horse. You can take the melancholy rhino.

          No—the horse is mine.

          As you wish, bish.

          Dear horse, you’re the color of a photo of the ocean on a travel pamphlet, with blood in the water.

          Catch up, summer hater! My rhino’s dusting you.

          This carousel isn’t true, but the water blood is.

          <quiet singing from the horse>

Hot blood drops from the sky into the ocean, sizzles, cools. Its red stains the paler fishes. Its scratched-copper smell draws the sharks.

My sister—a therapist—says feelings of panic and dread installed during childhood that surface irrationally in adult-life situations are known as “shark music.”

I blow a horn into the blooded ocean, without expectation. This is the way it feels best to live: sending, not asking.

On Cleopatra’s cedarwood ship, the sails were drenched in perfume.

Done with carousel.

          With fragrant sails.

          Done with sky, salt, chinos, rhinos.

          Bring me instead the head of a bird, still attached to its body. A bird who is blue with blood-hemmed feathers. Put the bird upon a Grecian urn.

          I don’t perform with just any old one. I was trained in circus-adjacent locations, in lands of sausage and polenta, cold mountains where your lungs have to try harder.

          Bird and I and urn, we go onstage alone.

When I lived in the cold mountains, I ate Friday suppers at a restaurant known for its cardamom Dampfnudel. One night a customer stood up, pressed his palms tight together, and began yelling about drinking people’s blood.

          I admired his act and was not frightened.

          The manager asked him to leave. He did, but not before stealing a butter knife, with which he proceeded to stab a small tree.

Our performance begins with a lesson: A preposition is anything you can be or do with a cloud.

          What’s the angriest preposition? Over.

          The saddest? Without.

          Red saliva drops into the urn, from the beak of the bird, and the audience cheers.

          This was not in the act!

          <quiet singing from the bird>