The trick is to boil the water, he says, then carefully drop the nugget of glass inside. He shivers his fingers to show the resulting steam, which will spread out thinly, rising above his enormous head, perfectly odorless, barely a mist in the late-day sun. Another man walks from the camp at the riverbank, rolling the end of his shirt like a sack. I got one here, he says, seined us a toad. He holds up a little black tadpole, kicking its one black leg in the air. Put it in the bowl, the first man says, and positions the lighter beneath the pipe. They watch it circle the tiny bulb of light. Eyelessly searching the edge, hooking and cracking its leg like a whip. The water begins to bubble and drift, swirl in colorless patterns of heat. The one man laughs as the first man takes a hit, and the spinning body, writhing now, knocking its head against the glass, begins to glow.
134 The Paris-American
Kai Carlson-Wee has rollerbladed professionally, surfed north of
the Arctic Circle, and traveled across the country by freight train. His work
has appeared or is forthcoming in Linebreak,
Best New Poets, Forklift Ohio, and The
Missouri Review. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he lives in San
Francisco, California, where he is a Jones Lecturer in poetry at Stanford
University.