September 3, 2024 - “All the time” by Elizabeth Lerman
For a few weeks after he leaves, you find it hard to be alone, a feeling that whole heartedly infuriates you because there had been a time, not long ago at all, where you loved it. Preferred it, even. You think about going to the bookstore, the beach, taking a walk and getting a beer, think about sitting down in the grass and seeing how strong the sun will get. You think about doing a lot of things you like to do, but the way you did them so happily on your own is something you are having trouble remembering, and you know time heals everything, but you are wondering what you’re supposed to do in all the time until then.
August 22, 2024 - “Untitled” by Masha Vasilieva
Masha Vasilieva is a film photographer based in Brooklyn, NY. Her works have been exhibited at Soho Photo Gallery (exhibition “Krappy Kamera”, 2022) and Glasgow Gallery of Photography (exhibition “Blue”, 2023). She is fascinated by every day life, double exposures and film photography experiments. More of her works are available at https://www.mashafilms.net/
August 21, 2024 - “wrest.” by Linda Dolan
it’s that i tell god: fine.
you stay over there. you sit on that couch.
i’ll sit in this chair. don’t leave.
don’t talk to me.
that i say: anyway, i don’t buy it.
i don’t buy that you couldn’t’ve done so much better
if you made the whole world. i think it’s a shitty plan.
i say: fine. so it’s a shitty plan. and the whole world sucks.
at least i have our heart disease too, at least i’m not the only
one without it, at least you have some messed-up sense of justice.
and: i know my pain is only one small pain
amongst all the great big pains happening everywhere
all the time to all such precious people.
— which is exactly the problem: all such precious people.
and: i’ve been asking you to do something for a really long time.
and: don’t talk to me.
just so you can ask me to do more shit for you.
my whole life taking care of sick people.
and: i do not want to write
what i can only write because he’s dead.
i do not want to live
where i can only live because he’s dead.
i won’t say this is in any way okay.
it’s like how chris and i get in a fight and we fight all week
and then he wakes up at seven a.m. on the morning of our party
and cleans the apartment and vacuums the floors and greets the guests
and i’m glad, thankful, grateful. but that doesn’t mean i wasn’t alone.
so thanks, god, for grad school, the apartment, a nearby yoga studio.
but i don’t need a partner just to vacuum my floors.
i don’t need a god just to vacuum my floors.
also: why doesn’t anyone see that being grateful makes it worse?
i want to be mad and say that god left us. i’d rather he leave us
than treat us like this. i’d rather he just be asleep.
August 18, 2024 - “There is always a moment” by Elizabeth Lerman
There is always a moment, when you are walking, where you realize you are walking. You catch a reflection in a window and acknowledge that you are a human moving your legs to get somewhere else, and now, you don’t know where you’re going, really, just know you’d like to see the water and some of those small wooden houses on the way.
You pass the children’s museum, the nature center, places the boys went growing up, and suddenly you are thinking there is so much more to see here, that maybe time and space are not your enemy, and you don’t always have to be doing something just because you don’t know what you’re doing.
The pond is a shallow marsh at this hour.
You watch the glass water sitting between reeds, low reaching branches brushing against the surface sending slow ripples out in small rings, and it makes it look like it is raining, very gently, only in one spot, and the sound, too is something you want to give into, a chorus of cicadas, or crickets, something that sings, and you stand still, stay with the reeds and the water and let cars fly past you, wondering if you are seeing something they’re not, if something specific is keeping you here, back to the road, eyes towards the water, and you wish there was somewhere to sit, or lie down for a while, wanting to curl yourself up inside the tall grass.
You see Patty’s porch light flicker on, sensing the setting sun. You hear her screen door swing open a few moments later. You know when you turn you will see her sitting in her favorite chair, watching the woods, and the water, and wondering where summer was off too so soon. She’ll wave you over and tell you to sit. She’ll give you a beer and say, nothing like last year, is it?
August 16, 2024 - “The City Woos You Back” by Betsy Guttmacher
Beloved city I have been unfaithful
I fell in love with creeks rail trails Rosa rugosa
dipped my feet in the mineral cold of the Rio Grande
strapped on snowshoes in backcountry but all this beauty
was never mine not the way you belong to me
and I to you
Countless times my heart said done
My heart said abandon run
you with your sidewalk sparrows eating chicken wings
how can you do this force us to gnaw our own kin
in broad daylight I made plans
bucolic plans out-buildings and a meadow
Still I drag garbage to curb toss other people’s dog shit bags
my car street cleaning the purgatory
later I walk the entire length of Vanderbilt Avenue
high from wine and women friends the magic hour
orange light bounces off red brick Brooklyn
off the leafy view from a venetian verandah
Impossible buildings dragged from all over the world
reassembled all of us tucked in never alone
again you give this walk this moment a life
its Wonder Wheel its density and mirrors
forgive me when I forget to look or can’t bear to
Tonight autumn crisps each street light
bellies full dodge weave hipitty hop every face a smile
everywhere hands are touching and you beloved city
fingers entwine with mine we walk
we whisper lip to ear lovers again
Betsy Guttmacher is a Reiki practitioner based in Brooklyn, NY USA who works privately with individuals, and in community and medical settings. Her creative and healing work centers relationships - to ourselves, each other and our planet. She is a member of the Sweet Action Poetry collective and a contributor to three of its chapbooks. Her poems can be found in the forthcoming Bullshit Lit 2024 Anthology, Bowery Gothic, the Brooklyn Poets Anthology, and the Bridge
August 15, 2024 - “Untitled” by Masha Vasilieva
Masha Vasilieva is a film photographer based in Brooklyn, NY. Her works have been exhibited at Soho Photo Gallery (exhibition “Krappy Kamera”, 2022) and Glasgow Gallery of Photography (exhibition “Blue”, 2023). She is fascinated by every day life, double exposures and film photography experiments. More of her works are available at https://www.mashafilms.net/
August 14, 2024 - "sometimes, pirates." by Linda Dolan
i haven’t been able to find my umbrella for a while now
and until today it hasn’t really down-poured. i’m afraid
that at counseling tonight, chris will say he’s leaving,
and it feels like the right place to do it.
i miss my dad again with the stabbing pain.
and it’s been a few months since my heart surgery now.
my bag is too heavy with the smoothies and a glass jar of chili
and the books and computer for the day. and the rain is fat drops
plopping their way into my bag and onto my computer
and i realize i’m walking very slanted and very cold, proud
that i’m doing the only thing i can.
but numb.
and then i transfer to the r train at times square.
and from 42nd street to 8th street, the conductor speaks pirate:
this is a brrrrooooklyn boouund arrrrrrrrrrrrr train.
and each stop, i think he might laugh or trip up. but each time
i’m grinning, and he’s: arrrrrrrrrrr train. next stop twenty-tharrrrrrrd street.
there are moments
in this world
that give me strength enough
to cry.
“sometimes pirates.” is a poem from the author’s chapbook i’m probably betraying my body (Bottlecap Press, 2024)
linda harris dolan is a poet and editor living in Lenapehoking/Brooklyn. As Poetry Instructor at NYU Langone Health, she leads writing workshops with nurses, medical students, caregivers, and pediatric patients. She is Assistant Poetry Editor at Bellevue Literary Review. She holds an MFA in Poetry from NYU, where she was a Starworks Creative Writing Fellow. Linda is the recipient of fellowship support from The Rona Jaffe Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Starlight Foundation, Brooklyn Poets, and the Ruth Stone House. Her chapbook, i’m probably betraying my body (Bottlecap Press, 2024) traces the experience of one person in a body, amidst a family full of bodies, navigating life with a genetic heart disease.
August 13, 2024 - “The Ivory-billed Woodpecker” by Miles Greaves
Which it does not, it was the evaporation of those river-bottom forests, which vanished, like hair from a leg, I remember those trees weeping tears of sap, as the saws neared their bellies, but they were halved anyway, anterior bark to posterior bark, xylem and phloem. And I remember helping shave those forests smooth to the stone, as if with an apple peeler, the flesh, the topsoil, the loam, the bedrock, tubers and moles, fossils and coffins—they curled in front of us like pencil shavings, until we reached the Gulf, and then collectively puffed it all into the Atlantic, and ran our palms over the continent, clean as a desk. Behind us, the yellow land was peppered with Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, who were trying to perch on the now-nonexistent trees, but were hailing out of the sky, and swimming clumsily along the ground, and mewing. Seeing this, some men and some women looked away, as if from their naked father, because these used to be the Lord God Birds, or Diana bathing, or the bare eye of a singularity, or the number i, or the Entertainment, or the sun, as delineated as dominoes, with bills of bone, and a crest like a sail of thundering blood. And so I stepped, bird to bird, and with my heel I pressed each one of their skulls into the earth, as if forcing them to become ostriches, until the species entire lay where they were, like crops, with their tails spiking unattractively into the air.
The Passenger Pigeon used to dim the air with their flocks, days long in the passing. I would see them cresting the mountains like a storm, or static, cooing, and I’d watch the townspeople flee to their pigeon-shelters, while old men, caught in the street, would inhale the birds, or hold their breath, and try paddling vertically through the feathers and beaks, but inhale, always, and settle toward town again. And when the flock thinned, the townspeople would breathe into the old men’s mouths, and pump the birds from their lungs, but it was always the pigeons that they wound up resuscitating, the birds would flap from their mouths and rejoin their herds, dizzy. But I would don fishbowls and pots and wade into the flock, with tennis racquets and golf clubs, and swing, it was like rowing over tar, the pigeons knotted on my clubs, like seaweed. Sometimes, at the instant of their arrival, I would throw mousetraps and beartraps and nails into the air, and sometimes I’d wait behind drills, or industrial fans. I would discharge rifles into the cloud, to watch the brief tube augured into the flock, which would hold momentarily, then close. As the species died, though, the tunnels lost clarity, by the final pigeon it was arguable that the tunnel had been inverted so as to encompass, backward, everything but that last bird, so out of philosophic curiosity I shot it through its canary cage in the Cincinnati Zoo, but there was no lightning, no shift in things.
The Carolina Parakeet would perch on telegraph lines and eavesdrop; pooling the word or two that each knew of English, like “cracker,” or “good,” or “extirpation,” and decode, piecemeal, any communications concerning the genocide of birds. Then, hearing enough, but being unaware of their English name, they tried fleeing North Carolina, but broke their necks in the air above the Tennessean border, like green snowflakes trying to flee their snow globe. The remainder of the parakeets forswore squawking and froze like mimes in the green trees. They might be breeding today had I not begun publicly fawning over women with emerald feathers in their hats, and then women with two emerald feathers in their hats, and then three, until the women looked like emerald bonfires, and postures were ruined, but the fashion continued to mature anyway, until the Carolina Parakeets were skewered and mounted, whole, onto the tops of the hats; and until the body of the hat-proper was discarded, and the bodies of the birds were folded into the shapes of hats, alive, so that the hat would squirm, and squawk. This was the fate of the last Carolina Parakeet, which a milliner stitched into the hat of a young socialite. Its neighbors on the hat, which towered, like a tall brain, had died, like city lights in reverse, leaving only this last ambassador, twisting by a foot from the brim of the hat, for two days, stretching at the socialite’s lunch.
The Labrador Duck died like a rich family leaving a poor neighborhood, it freed the napkin from its collar and left the restaurant, with a valise of its DNA, which isn’t sold anywhere, I couldn’t even lure the duck closer to the shore, to the strangling hands there, because it disdained bread, so I had to wade after them in fisher pants, and even then they wouldn’t move, as if fleeing were undignified, I would just submerge their heads with a single casual finger, as if plugging a leak. One afternoon I looked back at the shore, where the men and women were supposed to be killing ducks, but saw that they were eating from picnic baskets instead, as if the duck supply were exhausted. Then I saw a man, who seemed to realize this too, and I watched him pull a drowned duck from the water, and try wringing it into life, but he couldn’t. And now that duck is endangered anyway, being the final Labrador Duck corpse in existence. The man must, then, keep it dead. Each evening he repoisons it, and before breakfast he reannihilates it with a shotgun, he brooms the feathers into a vat of rubber cement, and adds the duck’s body, and stirs, and sculpts, with the gruel, a fresh duck, which dries on his fire escape, like a pie. When not killing it, the man sits it on a dish of turtle eggs, or clips it to a clothesline, and hoists it between apartments, as if for a walk, or he takes it to the park, to show it living pigeons, in order to shame it.
The last Eskimo Curlew was consumed by hagfish, at the bottom of the Berring Sea; the last Bachman’s Warbler was disassembled by ants, outside of Orlando.
The last man to see a Great Auk breathe was Karl Kronson, who decapitated it with his ship’s auksword, a saber as bladeless as a whiffle-ball bat. The day before the extinction Karl was mopping on a whaling ship. He mopped vigorously up to a coil of rope, and turned proudly, but a ribbon of olive and maroon stains extended in a tract behind him. So Karl upended his mop and squinted into its locks, but he found no tomatoes there, no chalk, no gremlins, so he planted the mop onto a single stain, as if into a whale, and mopped in place, aggressively, until forgetting the time. But when he finished, the stain was as healthy as it had been before the mopping.
A bundle of moppers edged into his periphery, and passed, like a busy cloud of elbows. Behind them, like a clean rattail, the planks beamed, like long ingots. The moppers continued to the distant end of the deck and stopped and waited for Karl with their elbows on their mops. Karl mopped after them, along the border of their pristine trail, dirtying it, which forced him to reiterate and reiterate and reiterate his own inferior mopping. When he reached the crowd, Karl said:
“I finished an hour ago—this is my second time through.”
The moppers laughed.
“And you put back the old stains,” said one.
The moppers laughed.
“That’s harder than getting rid of the original stains,” said Karl.
The moppers laughed.
“No,” said a mopper. “You’re just a terrible mopper.”
At dinner, Karl stared at the table between his forearms.
“Maybe you’re not using water,” said a sailor, but ironically.
“Maybe it’s your mop,” said another sailor, but also ironically.
“At least you’re a good auker,” said someone else, but this was also an insult, because only the most inessential sailors were told to collect auks.
Then the captain came in. His eyes summersaulted over the crew in inexpressible disbelief. He held his arms in front of him, as if trying to hug something, but he couldn’t, so he dropped his arms.
“What happened, Karl?” he asked.
Karl spiked his napkin into his rice and stood. He saluted passed the captain, on his way to the mop closet, as if to reswab the deck.
“Wait wait wait,” said the captain, and he gestured Karl to a stop. Then he handed Karl a saber, as dull as an elephant tusk. “Just kill auks tomorrow,” he said, “and don’t try mopping them.” Then the captain made a gesture of ineffability, and left.
The auks’ last island was a wart of stone on the Northern Atlantic. The next morning, the whaler anchored off that rock and lowered a rowboat onto the ocean, with Karl inside. Karl, who was also a poor rower, rowed towards the wart in a series of semicircles, hearing the crew behind him chant “Auker! Auker! Auker! Auker!” until he could only hear the ocean; and, then, until he could only hear the auks. The planet’s remaining Great Auks had convened on that island, as if it were the only wood after a shipwreck, their weight pressed the island into the ocean, their feces softened it, they congealed and throbbed in aukpiles forty and fifty auks thick, their screaming sent whitecaps away from the island, they were copulating accidentally. Karl killed eleven just docking, and he crushed twelve just stepping onto the island, and as he killed auks the remaining auks ripened, subtly plumper with the increased percentage of the species that they represented. Then Karl walked into the center of the island, and gripped the saber like a baseball bat, and shut his eyes, and swung for several minutes. And as he did, he noticed, only, that the sound of the auks was fading, as if he were turning down their volume. When he opened his eyes, he was standing in a red and white and black clearing of mulch. The remaining auks were teetering in a dome around him, as if Karl were inside an igloo, but then they collapsed, and spilled toward Karl, curious. So Karl shut his eyes, and swung again, and the auksounds faded again, and faded, until Karl sat, panting, on a couch of dead auks. Fifteen or twenty obese auks remained, propelled into the ocean by the melee. They swam, smiling, back to the island, and beached themselves, and toddled across the rock, to Karl, holding aloft their fetal wings, and pressing their ribcages into Karl’s shins.
“I’m tired,” said Karl, “someone else can kill you,” and he kicked them away.
But the auks insisted, like the Zone Hereros, and so Karl stood, and took individual aim, and murdered each of the last auks, including the final auk, by this time as large as a dalmatian. At that, the chanting of the crew came back to Karl, over the water:
“... Auker! Auker! Auker!...”
Mentally, Karl blanketed the “auk” side of the chant with “mop,” but the illusion would not persist. Then Karl remembered that, in the minutes between his birth and his naming, he had cycled through the nearly infinite possibilities of being—alligator, toaster, Ayre’s Rock, Pythagoras—like a blurring slot machine in the crook of his mother’s arm. But then “Karl,” she had pronounced, and he had been fixed, for the duration of language, by “Karl,” in all possible universes.
Karl sat, jealous of the Great Auks, who were now absolved of their personal mediocrity, because there wasn’t a first name among them, so only the Auks were extinct, plural, like losing a color, not a crayon. And this meant that each singular auk, even the least great, was now free to excel at catching fish, or preening, or fending off polar bears—or they could become manta rays, or cubes of granite, or cacti—while even in death Karl would still be a poor mopper, and a poor sailor.
Karl made a similar complaint to me on the day I came for him, to swallow him. He lay on the deck of a ship, bent, like a spider, after falling from the mizen mast. He whispered up to me:
“Now I’ll always be a poor mopper.”
But “No,” I said, “in seventy years’ time you’ll be as unremembered, and as infinitely variable, and as good a sailor, as each of the Great Auks that you harvested.”
And then something similar happened after I swallowed the last of Karl’s species, a sick woman in a waterless cavern. First I savored the sharp taste of the whole of human culture, which stopped existing, and became unrecoverable, at the moment I swallowed her. And then the universe screamed once, as if mourning the loss of humanity, which meant that its awareness of itself would dim—no more equations to define it; no more songs to celebrate it. But within the hour it had flattened back out into nothingness, and by year’s end it was remembering mankind, only, as the species that had been driven into extinction by the Ivory-billed Woodpecker.
Roger T. Peterson, A Field Guide to the Birds of Eastern and Central North America at 188–89 (4th ed. 1980).
Miles Greaves is an attorney living in Sleepy Hollow, New York, with his wife and two young boys. A story of his won first place in Zoetrope: All-Story's Annual Short-fiction Contest, and others have appeared in Tin House, Jersey Devil Press, and Storybrink. When he gets some free time, Miles enjoys birding, playing basketball, and watching “The Challenge” with his wife.
August 1 - 8 is READING WEEK!
Curlew accepts submissions on a rolling basis but we are taking the next week to focus specifically on reading / viewing new submissions, so send ‘em in! We publish poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction, which includes nearly all forms of reporting and journalism. We also accept photography and visual art.
Accepted submissions will be published as part of Curlew Daily with the possibility of also having your work featured in our next print issue.
Submissions may be e-mailed to Info@CurlewNewYork.com and will be read and viewed upon receipt of the $7 reading fee, which can be made on the submissions page on our site. Thank you to our submitters, contributors and readers for your interest and support!
All our best,
Curlew
July 31, 2024 - “Tightrope Walker: Two” by Ray Zhang
Ray Zhang is currently a student at Columbia University who has studied under Ernest O. Ògúnyẹmí and Lisa Hiton. He has been recognized by the Health Humanities Journal of UNC-Chapel Hill, Thimble Literary Magazine, and the New Zealand Poetry Society. In his free time, Ray enjoys hiking through the Michigan wilderness and fishing on the lake shores.
July 30, 2024 - “Summer Has Nearly Begun, and Summer Is Nearly Over” by Alivia Francis
Yes, indeed.
A brief embark
A burst of passionate sincerity
Crying out into the dark
"And after that another"
Yes, indeed.
Bare-legged
under an umbrella,
Trudging home
After our dance
"Once upon a time we were Europeans"
Yes, indeed.
Held together by tangled roots
We turn for home the future coming,
Now it's so clear,
"I remember, I remember"
Yes, indeed.
I am continuously inspired by the lives of those around me, as well as by the several lives I feel I have accumulated within myself during my 25 years thus far. My poetry is a collection of my tumultuous thoughts that are feverishly and sloppily written mostly in pen, and mostly when I am least expecting them. I frequently attend poetry readings at The Music Inn and have a collection of personal zines that are soon to be self-published under my name, as well as a few small unpublished collaborations with other artists. — Alivia Francis
July 28, 2024 - “Summers in Guangdong” by Ray Zhang
My grandpa is cooking tonight and shows me how to pick the best eels.
He brings me to a thousand black tongues dancing in ashy buckets, growing plump under humid heat.
I reach in, ready to teach my fingers the feeling of slime, but he pulls my hand away.
He points to pairs of red gills and dark pupils, noting how they curve crests atop each other.
The fishmonger gives him two as I grasp his arms.
Tastes of summer brine etch in my throat as I wait to wash it away with eel congee.
July 27, 2024 - “Water and stone” by Elizabeth Lerman
You spend so much time thinking about being a person that sometimes you forget to be one. Even now, you leave a moment of bliss to come write this down before it’s gone, and by the time you are out of the pool the right phrase has left your mind, and if time were really ours we’d be able to go back and now you are here wishing you could read your own thoughts like a book. You disappoint yourself by being human. You smoke some more and go back to where you were sitting, on the steps in the pool, where the sun shone and you remembered to close your eyes and feel it. You do it again, you close your eyes and listen to the constant flutter of water slapping against stone, to the lawnmower next door, the car pulling into a gravel driveway, the pool water again, the cawing of some bird, the squeaking of another, water and stone, a car door slamming, two doors and then keys. You see him through the patchy stalks of wood between your yards, see a child picked up and carried inside, a woman emptying the trunk, her and the man both holding large coffees. They walk right when you think they’ll go left, and you realize you've been looking at their garage this whole time, not their house. The house is to the right, past a thicker bush that does not let you see through it, and watching them disappear behind the green mass, you enjoy the idea that you are nothing to them.
July 26, 2024 - “Tightrope Walker: One” by Ray Zhang
Ray Zhang is currently a student at Columbia University who has studied under Ernest O. Ògúnyẹmí and Lisa Hiton. He has been recognized by the Health Humanities Journal of UNC-Chapel Hill, Thimble Literary Magazine, and the New Zealand Poetry Society. In his free time, Ray enjoys hiking through the Michigan wilderness and fishing on the lake shores.
July 24, 2024 - “Where we’ll stay” by Elizabeth Lerman
Patty likes to take tab at the start of every season and walk her favorite trails. She’s been doing it since the divorce. She told May that trying it with her that one time in the woods, in the cabin by the lake, that day when Patty’s parents weren’t home, and Allan and Bobby had blown them off for beers in town, was one of her favorite days. Patty’s uncle had been there the week before and offered them some and May accepted but when Patty had raised her open palm she slapped it away, saying they had to save it for sometime special, when men weren’t around, is what she meant, and so they had stored the tabs in a jewelry box on Patty’s dresser in her room at the cabin and asked Patty’s parents if they could have a sleepover the following weekend, saying we are running out of time, and who knows what will happen after school ends, we may not ever see each other again and even Patty’s parents had to roll their eyes at that because where did these two think they were going, but still they said okay and for a saturday the place was theirs, and so they stripped down to cotton undies and sunbathed on the rocks by the water, and Patty put mud on her face and walked through the woods for a long time, while May made the sun room an art studio and drew at a desk that was made of wood that came from these woods, and by the time Patty came padding through the screen door, they had both decided to never leave, and neither of them ever did. The story sits like so many others they have told, they type that leaves you feeling safe and sad and stuck someplace you sort of don’t mind being stuck in.
July 21, 2024 - “First Marriage” Elizabeth Lerman
You hear Patty’s loud laugh and think about how much nicer it is when she’s here. May becomes less of a mother and more of a person, and the boys are calmer too. Patty brings a little bit of her brother with her wherever she goes, and everyone feels lighter because her cackle sounds just like Bobby’s.
Patty says she was married to May first, citing the time they had built an altar in the woods behind the house and had Bobby tape a white strip of paper to the neck of his black tee shirt to officiate.
You wonder what it would feel like to be family from the start. You find it both envious and impossible, that they will all be happy here forever.
They’d written their own vows, had read them out loud as Bobby tried not to laugh, and then they sealed the ceremony with a kiss – not a real one, May would insist – the kind where you grip each others cheeks and put your thumbs over the others lips and then pressed your lips to your thumbs and sway together in an imitated embrace. Schoolgirl stuff, she says, blushing.
A decade later, on May and Bobby’s wedding day, Patty read the vows they had written as girls and even the groomsmen cried. You can’t imagine having so much love for so long and you think, on her best days, this is why May wants you to have a child so badly. She knows what you are looking for and she is saying here – there’s a way to have that. But mostly, May just wants a baby. Mostly, she just wants another go, and on your best days, you almost want to give it to her.
