the man on the bench had a laugh
like an empty can of paint falling down the stairs.
that means i liked him. i liked a lot of people then,
it kept me warm. that november i was awake
if only inside of my own head. my friends and i had a candle
made out of an altoids tin and it kept us warm.
i kept it in my pocket even though it got so hot it almost
burned. i kept it in my pocket even still. everyone
wanted to see the tunnels we had found behind the buildings.
we took them to the tunnels. the can of paint rattled around
inside of my head, the man was laughing over and over again,
we found a tunnel behind a building, and a candle to keep us
wa
the full moon aches.
tuesday nights are always full of statues.
i wonder what it is to be dead. do you remember
the mother? the comedown from the other, write
as an animal, as a breathing piece of fabric--
the fabric felt in the lines.
you are the main event. hold still.
disengage. you are no mercury flower.
imagine imagine imagine. the airplane
coating of skin to bone. all flesh is concentrated
on your ankles.
so much has happened and will happen
before we can respond to this as an end. epicenter.
the spider-work of lines.
the gas station attendant wondering
if he did the right thing.
the sky holding its breath, beware, beware.
there ar
the sand paints a cleft into my back
and the sky can tell i am not listening.
i wish
i could be anywhere else.
i wish
i could be underwater.
the amber horizon loosens itself,
the daylight is approaching,
i am no nearer to where i needed to be
than i was when the night came,
i am no nearer to where i needed to be
but there is something stirring in the cavity
of my chest, a cancer perhaps
or maybe just a call to arms.
the madness is coming.
small cells bewilder at its approach.
the blood beats itself into my fingers.
the body hums and runs.
i am not new to it.
the madness, not the body.
i am very new to the body.
i have swallowed the chaos be
a fracture in late august by Aquarius-Claire, literature
Literature
a fracture in late august
You were a venture capitalist with a sharpie, drawing strip malls up my shoulders.
You were a half-mile of train tracks on a Sunday night at the very end of summer, our lips fresh with the tastes of grass and each others necks.
You were everything I could carry in a purple scarf—two empty glass bottles, a pack of Marlboro Reds, a picture you drew of me on your bed that first morning when I propped myself up on my elbows to write.
You were almost a notebook full of plans.
You were an expanse of skin beneath my deaf hands, and after that first night in the grass when all I could say was holy shit you were grinning into my back, saying
there’s this picture of some rooftops in new york
and over the rooftops there’s this rainbow
like a question mark lying on its side like it’s not even sure
that it should be a rainbow, it’s like when you exhale by accident really
softly on birthday candles and the flames ripple a little and everyone
thinks you made your wish even though it was just
a mistake, it’s a rainbow like that, like it happened
by mistake
and the picture reminds me of this one day when i was
looking out the window of ms. azeglio’s office when i was fifteen
as she talked on and on without
saying anything, talked about fixing me i
wat
i think i broke
some bones in my sleep.
i remember waking up
and saying i will do it in the morning.
my floor is littered with broken things
i meant to fix. there is a mosquito
in here growing fat on the things
i have intended to change.
the radio whose battery light is flashing
a slow sos at the darkening ceiling.
the piles of old letters stacked like snow.
the people who told me
they were lawyers and insurance
brokers in the elevator
one time at two in
the morning with the stench
of death on their breath.
the day my body stopped
healing.
let’s stop saturating toothaches
I crashed into a supermarket
grandfather was a stallion
I am a can of condensed milk.
three bears alike in size.
bones protrude from a bowl of porridge.
a shredded microwave.
stop burning markers.
crayola evangelical,
tree-house choir,
church in tongues.
shaved television,
frozen ideals lined up like
tin soldiers in an ice-tray.
chaos on a wire, marble-faced earthquake.
you’re the hope, the holes.
the chipped emissaries of doubt.
where have the snow-children gone?
if you are ceramic, give me another answer.
conquer the toilet-bowl frailties.
you are a poem etched in the Brillo-pad
in my kitchen
the furrowing of
the brow is caught at a
slant-light.
and every horse stands
still in its pulp. the ground wants us
to be more than trees. don’t
tether yourself to me. I can’t stand
being needed. I will contour every
question with another:
where are elbows kept?
--in jars of plastic moths but
I won’t tell you how to plug in
your telephone there are too
many beads in you
why are apartments so full of corners?
--once we had a child made of
clay and we fed him to the wind.
he was so full of trees. and polymerase
and such. i watch the reactions
race each other down the blue gel.
when i was four i married a boy.
i wore a suit and he wore a dress.
i didn’t know i was different. i suppose
i should have known. i’ve spent a lot of
lunchtimes alone. i’ve spent a lot of time
holding shadows. i’ve spent a lot of money
on coffee i don’t drink. and maybe i’m just
crazy. i spend a lot of time thinking maybe
i’m just crazy. maybe i grew up wrong.
or i didn’t have time to think myself awake.
i am still a freak. a shadow of a doubt. double
vision twisted me dry and i’ve got a needle in my
eye i’m not sure where it came from.
maybe it came from me. maybe i’m just n
i want to watch a hundred thousand
varied frames like the sound of a second.
breathe this in, this life
like a bottle of flowers. everything will become
like a glowing glove, like a burning map.
there is too much to be in awe of. the
speckled light of microwave on my hands.
the sound when the days end
and the nights explode, this
explosion is a hundred thousand frames
per second desperate for the moment when
we fall apart my heart
is a water balloon. deep on the shores of the atlantic
hold me like a frozen tide.
we would never make the news
but we made a thousand stereoscope slides.
we wanted life to be in three dimensions.
i dreamed about