Ideas are as real

as horses, as hay dust, as jellyfish, as real as earth, as flushing the hot water from the garden hose, as real as the car you don’t have and red flags and yellow flags, surfers and lifeguards, as real as sleep after a nightmare, as a fifty-year sentence, as drums, as carbonation, as a wave just passing through, as pigeons in the soffits and how she would mind even now, all these years after selling the house, as real as parking, as wedding rings, train tracks, grapefruit and staple guns, gulls skimming warm hills of compost, as real as lake, as fear, as Love’s Fresh Lemon, beauty contests, baby oil, nosebleeds, skipped beats, hankies, laundry chutes, real when you are here and real when you are not, as real as life and death, and even now ideas are as real as index cards and rulers, sun roofs, one note in forty throats, in forty bodies, in the forgettable eternity of all our plastic.

Inspired by a line (these ideas, which were also realities) chosen at random from Molly Lynch’s novel The Forbidden Territory of a Terrifying Woman.