Sitting on the floor of my bedroom in Seattle
(Kirkland — Costco boom town, after we moved away),
listening to a record where Sesame Street characters sang
various ’70s a.m. gold favorites, like “Feelings”
(whoa, whoa, whoa)
but they made it about emotions other than love.
Anger, I imagined as a hot, itchy cable-knit sweater
yellow or red, a flash like the end of a cigarette
(there it is again).
Anger was something I wanted to put somewhere
outside my room, if it had to exist at all,
maybe in a glass bowl in the kitchen, like the guppies
we had for a while, more and more of them,
giving them away in jars.

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9 (to explain later)