

You have stayed, stubbornly, a frog. My lips are green from their efforts to cure you—they’re pond-logged and wrinkled. You don’t seem to remember the procedure. You think I’m an amphibian fetishist, or that I came to look for my own reflection in the water, but found you instead. Either way, you’ve said, we’re compatible. You keep croaking about gourmet flies and crickets and about lily pad real estate and about how beautiful our polliwogs will be. Through the reeds, I hear your friends say that, years ago, before your first marriage, you had a full head of hair, expressive mammalian eyes, a goddamned castle, an affinity for your own species.