Ian Willey
Progress
I tell him there were stickleback
in this stream but the water got
dirty from all the detergent and
the chemicals people put on their
lawns so now they are gone
and this makes him sad but I don’t
tell him there is such a thing as
progress, that there were once laws
in place to prevent people like your
mother and me from getting married
at the same time the stickleback
were free to build their little nests
in the weeds along the bank.
Ian Willey really wants other people to like him, though he’s pretty good at pretending not to care.