I think “hotten” is a perfectly good word.

Rosie is not allowed on this chair.

A purple plaid curtain droops out the open second-story window of a church I thought was abandoned.

A man on a ladder behind a fence sprays water down onto a car parked on the street. He will not let a short hose stop him from washing his car.

The grocery store is packed with Thanksgiving shoppers. I take a couple minutes to choose lettuce. When I step away, a woman I hadn’t noticed says THANKS, thick with sarcasm, as she takes my spot. (1/2)

The cashier at the used book store has fuzzy brown hair pulled up in a voluminous poof on top of her head. She asks if I found what I was looking for. I did.

A hawk perches on a wire. Two crows caw and divebomb, over and over like it’s choreographed. When a third crow arrives, the hawk tips off the wire and glides away. One of the crows lands in the hawk’s previous spot. As I write this on my phone, a coyote trots past on the wet street.

In Target, a young woman with long blonde hair frets because she can’t find the baking aisle. Her guy shouts at an employee, “Hey ya boss man, where the sprinkles?” She is embarrassed but pleased.

In the backyard, Rosie tries a single woof and looks at me to check. If it’s too early, I tap the window and she knows to be quiet. If it’s past 8, I smile and then she has a happy bark.

On my morning walk, I see my nice neighbor Bob with his brown and white dog. I cross the street because I don’t want to talk, but I wave and grin to make up for it.

Pinewood and Microcrack should be a poem. An angry poem.

Two freeway lanes were merging, so I accelerated ahead of a white truck in my blind spot. He honked and revved around to drive alongside and shout at me. I guess he wanted to be the one to go first.

One year ago, I clipped a leaf from a fiddle leaf fig and plunked it into a pot of dirt. Today, it looks exactly the same.