Wednesday Dearest, It is humid, grotesquely hot, no rain for the dying: Those dear faces wilted into the earth, gone for more than three days now. Side by side like fallen ladies. But why complain? The dead are turned over so casually. Thursday Good! No visitors today. My window, which is not a grave, is filled with my fierce concentration and too much light and too much silence. The sun has quietness in it; no songs, no smells, no shouts or traffic. When I speak my own voice startles me. Wednesday I have invented a trick. There actually is no other day but Wednesday. Yet it seemed reasonable to pretend that I could change the day like a pair of shoes. To tell the truth days are all the same size anyway and extra words aren't much company. If I were a child, they would have just tucked me in bed under a cool sheet, and I'd be sipping iced tea. As it is, captive days are not worth hoarding or lying about. Regardless, you are the only one that I can bother with these matters. Wednesday It would be lovely to be drunk: faithless to my lips and tongue, giving up the perimeter for the heroics of Southern Comfort. Dead drunk is the term I am thinking of, insensible, neither cool or warm, without head or foot. To be drunk is to be intimate with a fool. I might try it shortly. Wednesday It must be Sunday by now. I admit it I have been lying. Days do not freeze and to say the sun has quietness in it is to overlook the possibilities of such a word. Wednesday Dearest, where are your letters? The mailman is in on the conspiracy. He is actually my uncle who rode the lawnmower off into a storm with his nicotine beard and a tiny sack full of nickels. His legs stumble through rows of the departed. Like all observers of death he picks up his disguise, shakes it off and slowly passes my window, fading like an exhausted sunset. Now he is gone but he belongs to me as do you, like misplaced baggage. Monday I've decided not to send more letters. A woman who writes feels too much, as if moon cycles and dust were not enough; as if gossips and vegetables were never enough. Now I'm thinking about the stars. A writer is essentially a spy. Dearest, I am that woman.

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CK Tower, founder and lead editor for Conspire — a quarterly journal of literary art — resides in Lansing, Michigan and attends Michigan State University, where she is pursuing a double major in English and Women Studies.

CK's work has seen wide publication in print and electronic journals such as: The Mississippi Review, Zuzu's Petals, The Allegheney Review and CrossConnect. She also serves as poetry editor for Recursive Angel, and is the host of Word for Word, a literary interview series from Riding the Meridian.

In the Spring of '99 CK was nominated and accepted for lifetime membership in the National Society Of Collegiate Scholars.