By Kate Davis
Alternate your gaze between laptop, drywall, and churning clouds beyond the chipped French door. Wrap your body around your dog’s and imitate his strange stiff-armed relaxation. Ruminate over why you don’t maintain a regular yoga practice. Unearth your ingrown toenail. In doing so, create a hangnail. Pull the smoking nachos from the broiler and eat them. Draw your mood every day, considering the psychological implications of the deformed sketches. Give up after three nonconsecutive days. Build the garden grow box, fill it with dirt, let the deflated balloon from the neighbor’s birthday party drift into it, let the wind swaddle it with clippings and arsenic lake dust. Pull up the resurrecting mushrooms from under the maple. Their delicate layered gills like wet Styrofoam. Perform dispassionate interpretive dance in the next rain. Whisper that after 260 days of labor, you will earn 10 days of free will. Keep the whisper from growing into a primal scream that will disturb the downstairs neighbors. Swirl your hair in decadent tub water. Submerge your head and hold your breath, wondering what will happen if you keep your mouth sealed in a hard line, air still. Stand up too quickly, hitting your head on the ceiling. Use a bag of refrozen peas to ice your brains, bashed in too many times by the bludgeon of careful maintenance.
Kate Davis lives ten minutes from her favorite hiking trails in Salt Lake City, near where she grew up. She spends her mornings climbing rocks and writing poems, her days managing a nonprofit that helps teach kids English around the world, and her nights cooking, reading, and gazing into the eyes of her small red poodle, Henry. Kate graduated in December 2023 with a Bachelor’s in English. She worked on Inscape Fall 2021, working as Design Lead for the publication.