brawn / mulch / tryst / voice

In the mornings, I pretend to find solutions for things beyond my control, twirling the alphabet like a roulette wheel until certain words tumble out, and I pretend they’re tea leaves or optimistic prophecies slipped inside an after-dinner sugar cookie, and I pretend that in just a few hours, someone will call a truce to the war metastasizing seven times zones away, and I pretend no one has died, or will die, and I pretend that the…