Nodding off in front of a comicbook robin stretched across several panels, Darius upgazes me in my fantasy lake dress.
I am completely desired and completely alien
I have dragged my child along my knee while tracing letters on my knee
I have felt final skin in the tall grass of pretend
yellow spilled across
the soft-makingness
A butterfly woman covered in mud and wheezing at our back door. The dissolving of the whole scene into this one itch I have always got:
dusky kitchen time, summer evening feels, a lace blouse or a pretty silver bracelet, a lady singer coming out of a box, this era’s family hunkered down into lightness and air and a swaying curtain
That is not even it.
I don’t know how to tell you even the simplest thing.
I don’t know how to explain what I mean other than to say I truly enjoy bougee images from catalogues, and music/voiceover montage-letter-reading-scenes, and that it turns out that it’s true that ten years twenty years baby time toddler time sunscreen rubbed on sand sticking to it hot walks to playgrounds and fixing snacks
and then pouring wine glasses all summer evening
all of it is nothing
it is really truly nothing
and I hate trying to negotiate lived time and thought time
and most of it is spent unshowered and anxious and not doing anything nothing
Darius, what is wrong with me?
I cannot stand this constant circling to nothing strand
I am false
a false strand holding tideback a bundle of clichés, eight is a zero with a belt on, infinity, etc., etc., our girl is growing like a
In an alliance training session at work, after we are prompted to share a hidden part of our identities, a woman whom I know only from her face says that she had a child and this child died and she is alone in her knowing that she is a mother
and this secret makes me want to die
writing this makes me want to die
Translation of any sort makes a bizarre and impossible and gaping hole, forces a cave-collapse-storm where there is no weather. Family makes a hole, too.
The leap across: home. Done to me.
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge: “Time is ethos, as if we’re engendered by our manner in it, not required to be in ourselves.”
In silk pajamas
in the garden Katherine Hepburn Myrna Loy forced onto my/her body of mask-y vines
Noreen handling acid vials with lovely velvet fingers
a piglet in ice teeth chattering in a background song
Darius
Darius
in the kitchen Darius’ police scanner goin’ all evening
Darius
two cans of Hamms
he’s in a mood
Noreen is writing inside my mouth
is the girl trap tonight
& you know what I load braids around how you sweet-voiced dawn that one time
Start again inside of dry ice.
Chase a hallucination of a red scarf.
Darius, Noreen, and I.
Could there be a way of perceiving time
that is not bound to the dolls.
Could there ever be a gaze that isn’t miniature, and wine-ish in its lens.
No. I don’t think so. Recording equipment times out
then
feel another person in writing/reading
a familiar bulge from under a piece of rubber
Darius what. How it is to feel you in your writing in my writing.
It could not get
more miniature than this.
the feeling of scrubbing the burnt of a sauce pan
the friction-y caressing of Noreen’s dirty hands
haunted house pleasure a million times over
Darius’ poems stuck in my head like a hot teenage summer
Darius’ favorite songs my favorite songs
smoking pot like a hot teenage summer
all three of us hot in our hot apartment and playing songs
Noreen’s drawings: touch-tarot
pancake dinner: all of the moons lined up for our pleasure lined up like a car over a cliff
