James A. Hawley
	Lump      On the eighth day, we settle down to work the crosswords, noodle the acrostics, search for all the possible anagrams in “Overcoming Problems”; inscribe the names of all the people in all the villages & where they live & how much they earn & what they owe & what they have & what they haven’t. This is called “qualitative easing.” We keep the ledger — quarter bound in goatskin with moiré silk boards—in the cellar, along with the jars of pickled antecedents & shrunken headlines, seek the meaning of “dungeon” in the Old Norse “dyngja,” a pile of manure, a woman’s workroom, a place of stench or sacrifice. We cut a bream into serving portions —solay! Another typo at the printer’s shop & de Morgan’s theorem which states that the denial of a conjunction is equivalent to the altercation of the denials & the denials of an alteration is equivalent to the conjunction of the denials, Shakefork. We are damaged goods & we know it, relegate in our new-found homeliness, tierced in pairie sable, gules & azure. The control towers have been mistaken for observatories.