p a s s a g e s
begin without announcement—but it’s said the cues live in the lighting. Between threads
unstrung as the fabric pulls taut (*)
(*) powder blue bleeding through fingertips / red smudged along the glass // silver glinting off white
in a spill of all things personal / flooded / against your knees against the concrete, a dizzy spell, a
portrait unravelling, gold unbroken inanimate
shrinking, swelling, reform folding in, visible but just out of reach*.
* but please, go on / for that which you’ve
missed and for the water that
shies from it
❈❈❈ Does it hurt like this? Do you mourn it? A list of things that move in linear progressions: a question, its answer, the question that follows, 656 pilot whales, a beach.
❈❈❈ When you asked me to consume (strike) when you asked to be consumed (strike) papercuts left by notes untaken: ocean, in itself, is a grey word; red, in itself, is green. We give our ghosts life by fearing them, don’t we? But you know what they say about growth and departing: empathy lives in the knuckle bones; entropy, in the fist.
❈❈❈ Trains. The lottery. Most chemical reactions. Birth. Court dates. Expulsion. Funerals. Digestion, decay, and the pulling of teeth. On loop in a voice like blue ribbon: this, this is it, and it isn’t.
❈❈❈Returning to the subject of lobsters: I had an urge to go shopping for peppermint plants, which is what I used to do when I wanted to feel closer to you. This isn’t as much a moment of nostalgia as it is the face of a canyon*. * a recipe for culling the dreamers: gather salt and milk and stale sugar in a glass mug named after your grandmother / shatter / scatter the fragments across the blacktop, and burn your feet trying to rescue the vapors / let the grass freeze over / repeat The first time I felt it, I was on my way to unpack dishes, and the lighting or the memory was blue.
