Lips curling from the humidity. Magnolia flowers, head-sized in your youth, sleepy-smelling, ginkgo splats rotting on the ground. Rotting on the sidewalk and in the brown steel rain gutters. Rotting orange and mealy in your shoe tread. Take care, now. Why. Why do the garbage cans still reek when you walk to work in the morning, when the garbage was scraped out an hour ago, you know because the truck woke you up, and before the sun’s high, even. Where’s all that hot garbage going. But it’s alright with the monophthongized “i”. And why’s the ginkgo with its dinosaur leaves. Why there, so bashful, you imagine, so embarrassed about stinking up the place. But secretly maybe a little proud, in the way only the shit-smelling destitute can be, prehistoric pride, to have made it this long. And maybe the smell’s only alright because you remember it, you remember it being there when you were a little boy. It’s historical. And if you could find other memories, deeper ones, only yours via a shaky, treacherous inheritance, the rest of it would be alright, too. If you could find the secret meaning of the toil that bore you. The toil that’s now yours.