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Electricity under water. Electricity under snow. The electricity of wires strung high from telephone poles above the earth covered with frozen water half the year. Electricity of unknown phenomena in Paulding, Michigan. Electric charge passed from hand to hand to hand to and from electric dryers in the men’s bathroom on the third floor of the old high school before they tore it down. Electricity of commitment to the circle to the circuit. Electricity flowing through us all when we held hands and touched both dryers, until one of us broke the chain and we all felt something burst inside. Electricity moving through the darkness keeping highways lit. Keeping houses lit. Keeping us all from the zero that is the cold that is the absence of heat and atomic motion. Electricity through phone wires carrying voices and conversations between lovers, fathers, friends, and long-gone mothers. Electricity held in generators outside wooden cabins and stored in the batteries of cars, hidden cold and under hoods. The electricity of beginning.

2

Electricity of lips in darkness. Electricity of cigarette lighters, cooling embers. Electricities of the body in friction with itself or with another. Electricity of dusk just before the sun drops below the horizon, the anticipation of the night and of the cold and of the breathing into it. Electricity of relationships’ ending. Electricity of sparkplug deep inside the car being called on to take a woman out of here, out of this bombed-out love affair, called on to give life to gasoline and engine pulse, called on to lead her out. Electricity to light the way.

3

Electricity of bootheel scuff on floor. Electricity of boots on tiled and well-worn floors. Electricity of watching through the hole above the girls’ shower in the old high school. Electricity of reflections in the steamed-through mirror. Electricity of light from lightbulbs. Electricity illuminating all that’s good, illicit. Halfway house electricity. Halfway down the hill electricity. Push-start classic cars electricity. Electricity of shop tools. Electricity of potential accidents. Electricity of thumbs lost to machines in the near future. Electricity of false starts and power spikes. Electricity of ambulance rides to the hospital. Electricity of EKG of light on screen in hospitals. Electricity of family gathered by the bedside holding hands and maybe chanting Kumbaya or some other family chant. Electricity of concentrated wanting. Electricity of waning moons.

4

Hand-cranked radio electricity. Electricity of flashlight light in nighttime and in snow. Electricity of bodies in midair. Electricity of story and of what can be remembered. Illusory electricity. Electricity of perceived godlike powers. Impossibility electricity. Electricity of charging through your life.

5

Hilarity electricity. Electricity of laughter catching fire and spreading through a room. Electricity of basking in that approval, that cause and that effect. Electricity like a virus keeping us from weather and from remembering all of those who died. Electricity of tracheotomy. Electricity of iron lung. Cancer electricity. Long-gone mother electricity. Electricity of her still in the air no matter what the therapist says no matter what the father says. New Liz electricity. Old Liz electricity. Her electricity still in the air still suspended in the air in AM/FM format in language format in some format that can be deciphered if we have sophisticated enough tools.

6

Vandalism electricity. Electricity of criminal actions taken under cover of the night. Electricity of necessity, of necessary violence. Electricity of necessary things to come of awful and unavoidable bad turns in roads. Electricity of botched chess endgames. Electricity of Russian angels who don’t ever botch the endgames. Electric cars, electric lights, electric spirits in the wires. Electricity of heart attachments, heart attacks. Electricity of the dead who are still in the air somewhere. Electricity of WHUH of WCCY of WOLV the wolf that stalks the soft-rock radio night. Sucking Christian rock electricity. Electricity of rock tumbling kits bought by our fathers that failed to match our expectations. Electricity of what is left behind.

7

Electricity of fire and fuse. Newfound science electricity. Like fusion like inertia-powered wrist watches. Electric lock picking sets ordered from catalogs that fail to work as well as promised. Electricity of failure to live up to expectations once again. Electricities of ice and fire and what comes between. Sublimination electricity.

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Unbelievable violence in this small town that no one could have predicted electricity. Electricity of crime in the public’s mind. Locked door electricity. News report electricities with every television on to get the story. Nightly news electricity. Nightly news coming across the lake from Canada electricity. Local nightly news with all the awful theories electricity. Guilty electricity. Will they catch him or will we form a posse to hunt the bastard down electricity. Sad to be the police force electricity, unable to corner the splinter in the public thigh.

9

Question mark electricity. The waiting for an answer electricity. The other story’s electricity. The car gone through the ice electricity. The loss like a plug pulled from a socket. Loss like a lightbulb burning out. Electricity of the memory of light of sunlight through a windshield. Electricities of reaching out to your dead mother. Electricity of calling up the dead lost and buried in the mines. Copper and iron ore electricity. Pasty and Nisu electricity. Electricity of calories stored in food. Electricity of the difference between calories and Calories (one is a thousand times greater than the other). Electricity of U.S. R.D.A. of nutrients in food. Digestive electricity. Such pleasure in the consumption electricity. The way the body breaks things down and stores it in the cells electricity. Electricity of moving on and on.

10

Electricity of potential sex on college campuses. Electricity of phone sex in the wires that cross the country all the time. Electricity of love songs in the air all around us all the time if we could only tune our silver fillings in. Electricity of constant loss and grieving. Electricity of reunion and renewal. Electricity of season even of coming spring. Electricity of the birds moving through the air in fixed pattern. Electricity of returning North.

11

Electricity of reluctant messages. Electricity of leftovers spoiled on the top shelf of the fridge. Electricity of being expected home now hours ago and where could she have gone? Electricity of I knew we couldn’t trust that boy. Electricity of comprehensive life insurance. Electricity of how can we go out into the world again into the grocery store again to buy baguettes to buy our beer to buy our batteries and breakfast cereal.

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Electricity of lost brother of missing arms of dreams of missing hearts and stumps and blood. Electricity of family tragedy. Electricity of missing central story of axe and accident. Singing electricity. Suture electricity. Amputation electricity. Electricity of What of love denied. Electricity of unknown language. Electricity of your mother speaking in a different language. Postage electricity. Electricity of salt on roads. Electricity of lowering the freezing point of water. Science and its electricities with their poisoned answers. Electricity of healthy and sometimes excessive disbelief.

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Obituary electricity. Self-blame electricity. Sometimes it helps to cry electricity. Electricities of brochures arriving in the mail for how to get on with your life. Electricity of temptation to just drive away across the snow across the ice across the highways and the international border to another country.

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Alphabetical electricity. Electricity of newfound form. Unusual and elemental electricity. Linguistic and eccentric electricity.

15

Electric charge of predicting the future. Piezoelectricity. Electric iron left on too long and burning electricity. Electricity of hand on thigh of memory of hand on thigh. Unconsummated electricity.

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Mathematic electricity. Another electricity of form. Electricity of the Fibbonaci numbers. Electricity of pervasive form. Discovery electricity. Electricity of the tastes of backs of necks. Voyeuristic electricity. Electricity of motion of keeping this and us in motion. Electricity of mostly gone. Investigation electricity. Electricity of expectation. Answering electricity.

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Evidentiary electricity. Electricity of there must be answers, something more than this electricity. Electricity of floating quotients. Ampersand and after electricity. Closing, locking doors electricity. Sometimes harmony is electricity. Electricity is harmony, too. Alignment of the particles electricity. Rigid structure electricity. Deep structure electricity. Organic, inorganic structure electricity. That which keeps all things together electricity. That which keeps all things apart electricity. Electricity of inertia of coming up against the wall. Electricity of what comes after. Next and leftover electricity. Electricity of ways to tie it up. Ending electricity. Electricity of minor satisfactions. Fraying blanket electricity. Hem electricity. Glowing ember electricity. Electric locks and combination.