Through what process of comparison should my attention fall on this heat
over milk
turning over velvet
The man in the next room has a cough in his ribcage
Insufficient that you should simply experience this exchange as time
Unable or unwilling to consider me head-on and also from the head down
Against what I have interrogated and diminished
I want only the scaffold and not its application
Or how else will this movement modify my limbs
But the pressure and waste of you in your gesture
And the city very brightly laid in brick
My heels clip on the inlaid brick
A private insistence like some immovable lake
With a relationship to that summer, if a negative one one of absence
Or something of cardamom
You are present and become altered
When it began to storm I leaned out of my window and so did the man across the courtyard
To flip the switch on a round fan facing inside 109 degrees, you remember
The light in my room was not on but he looked at me
Paused
I backed into that shadow behind the left window We lingered
He turned off the fan turned out his light
Always the impulse to favor one perspective
over another
Anna Zumbahlen is the editor-in-chief of Carve and a member of the poetry cohort in the creative writing PhD program at the University of Denver. https://www.carvezine.com/stories
