Going, going, going

Soon. I could list all the things I will do once I get to Korea, but I'll keep that inside my ears. So touchdown becomes an unfurlment.

Organza

The ridge of the shirt. The verdant email is not from you. Oh peek-a-bo0 through bush, though the red sheeted legs. Your laminated finger that slips, oh lips through me. Your finitude. This era in which I do crossword after crossword to sword you through. A boxed letter, a capital word.

Did you know how I liked that she had hips? That I dedicated every confetti firework to S and the longitude of our hearts? My bought and paid for hearse. His ripe and lolling tongue along hers. This is the song for bats in July, my airplane legs flying to you. This missing thing, the meaning I cannot know in a language I cannot understand. Even so, I went to claim it at the train station. It is the station that I have not yet come to.

This time period in which we asked: how do I conjugate the correct verb? Present or tense? I do not know how to tell you where to hit your self, but I can say that we must cycle through the outer banks, to rifle through used copies of our favorite novels.

I was thinking that it would be love it we'd read then, each to each, to the other.

Reliquaries

When you pack your things in boxes, you begin to see your possessions differently. Small heaps of coal dust. A set of nesting Japanese boxes with bent corners. A sandwich bag of bent pipe cleaners saved for later use. When my grandmother died, in her attic we found three sets of unused china. I have no attic, but I have kept all my old true love letters and often think it would be making good use of them to eat off of them. A long squall of spit through the heaves of my past. Eaves of my leave(ings). Yours. Ey(ore)'s and The Constant Doubts that buzz their fust even still, ever shrill. To preserve insects use amber. To preserve hang-ups use your diary. Eat Fig Newtons for fiber and a nutritious sweet. I am going overland to meet you. Carrying a batch of un-licked papers. My poems are full of tongues. Please arrive in a car wearing a scarf that makes me recall you completely before we touch lips.

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An old man was waiting for an old woman at the grocery store today. She was standing sorting through the tomatoes. She was scanning the pile of tomatoes, picking up one here, putting it back there, holding a few others in her hand.

The man pushed the cart back and forth a little. Then, he said, "It's not like you're choosing diamonds."

I couldn't tell if this was a gesture of affection or annoyance.

Portentious

The moon is yellow sulfur. Noxious wafer the clouds snuff out. In white dressing sheets, lightning over the top of the house next door. The frame draws a black picture box window that holds the cat still, so I can see the tufts of hair along its back reach towards the screen. Are these the neighbor's black hedges rimmed in white? This whole night feels like a film reel of a summer I lived when I was eleven or twelve. It is not cliche to say in the plains there is a wide open sky. This sky is the back of a man or some inverse ocean of blue grass or the feeling of a summer day with a walkman playing music in your ears and a set of white sheets (which in this sentence is the sky) that you have just hung to dry flap up in the wind to wrap around your body. In that sky, I almost slept with books and always read while lying in bed. It seemed then that being alone meant an invitation to think inside of things, some meditative hum. Now, the neurotic static of the air is a feeling of someone's hand on my heel. It seems like a regression in reverse.

Convincing Fictions

If you are Pisces you must swim. It occurs to me that this is important to keep in mind, to always remember how much swimming is like not thinking. Especially when you keep your swim cap pulled down low over your ears. Then you can only hear the sound of the water and your breathing bubbling like sonar off the side of a tub.

In the locker room, a crash of little girls. The youngest stands confidently in pink sandals and no pants. The ones who are a little older are carefully taking off their suits while putting on their clothes. One has rigged up a towel which she stands behind.

When I compliment her on her set-up, she says thanks. We discuss the embarrassment of having to take off your clothes in front of other people. Inside this conversation is a little chime or perhaps the center of the sound of the bird that wakes me up every morning. When I say I'm going to have to flash them, they say "It's ok, you get used to it."



This large park in Jaipur had large sundials and various ways to tell the time of day, year. Each astrological sign had its own dial. This was all built ages ago, but it still works. Some true science.

Cherries

Each day fills with something, though if you asked me what, I couldn't name it. Diffusion and languor. Soda and pacing.

If there are two sides to every equation, then we will be called one day by different names. This is not theological, rather what I mean is the passage through two parallel lines will slim us down to necessaries.

To find the center of the day, I would like to engage in ornithological debates about wing span, color, mating patterns. Or to work collectively to dye eggs a pale shadow of cherry. Some delicate work done with friends. Instead, you can often find me spitting the pits over my balcony, getting red juice under my nails. Wishing I lived in a tropical climate.

Zebras

There are people in the background wearing veils. Bats that swoop from the balcony in wide loops. Zebra stripes call for a head to be thrust between rips. To make a xylophone of the teeth, black and white, black and white. Wrappings of shadow and nightshade to tassel the pillows in safari flux. Regarding the future, it becomes clear that we will often feel as if we live in a diorama. Shadowed humps of our other selves in the background, blending in with our paper mache horizon. The stick along my spine, meeting the warm breath of someone shuttling me forward, into the scene.