#quiet glory

[earthcoil]

nothing less than ruth

Hungers tore from within

I don’t think there is a way to love

That can disentangle itself from prostration

The milk of limerence is that dance

Played out in the field

Of the mind

Nervous energy full of behests

In the wetness of my tears we started kissing

Stop for nothing less than ruth

[gemination]

Wound at Tangent Location

If I grew my hair long again could I unmake myself, memory of you a violence I dare not touch or snare myself beneath as beneath a stake-burnt vehicle on the roadside? Surely there's no one left to idolize beneath this brow of sky and swathe of jungle. I am that static fixture on the horizon of your worlds. Surely emblems have hollowed themselves out, been fistfucked, pitted, inside-outted. Your face but a watery dream, wavering through the smoke of the roadside blaze where once we collided, found that something hard could fit inside our mouths and demand blood from us. Surely if I tangled your name between my angry teeth it would dissolve me and leave my picked bones in the desert.

[earthcoil]

Dialogues

“[REDACTED]…! I never thought I would see you again. Like I did, but I didn’t.”

“…” For a moment, he doesn’t say, “Oh, wow, hi.”

They look at each other, regard each other. A thousand appraisals taking place in the time it takes for an eye to blink. It is difficult to categorize the fleet of emotions that make a half-show in the face of one or the other, not daring to fully emerge. A cavalcade of caricatures each anticipates they should emulate.

Hurried, to fill the elongating silence, he rattles off, “How’ve you been?”

As if she hasn’t heard this, she continues, “I mainly see you in dreams. Sometimes they feel so real…” She pauses, limning his face as if mining for a precious metal, choosing her words. “What is something that you’re thinking about right now?”

“I, um. Like anything?”

She nods.

“I’m… thinking… that it’s half-four on a Tuesday and I didn’t think I would see you here. I’m thinking about the way it’s making me feel that I’ve run into you, I guess. My mind is full of a lot of things.”

She smiles. There is the familiar, unbearable and almost violent urge to hold his face in her hands, to draw him to her. As it always had, it pains her physically to ignore this urge. The ache of this pain seeps somewhat into the corners of her face, her eyes and lips.

“What are you thinking about?”

“I’m trying to understand. I’m trying to say something that cannot be said. In my mind, you always knew what I wanted to convey without me having to say it. I have no way of knowing that it’s true, except that I just feel it. When I look into your face, I see my meaning reflected there.”

[earthcoil]

the pitch of my want

[gemination]

On M. & Herzog

               A bruised red flag at half-mast, the salt of seas and mouths and wounds. Urgency bespatters the scene, like a Werner Herzog film. With wine-stained lips I watched his Nosferatu and became flooded with fear at the monolithic image of the plague ship, black-clad, cutting across the screen. I discussed it feverishly with Marcus. There were so many frenetic thoughts I tried to communicate to him, images in film and music, bona fide horrors I had cherry-picked for his amusement, they ate at my heel like starving dogs during the nights I slept above Caledonian Road. How I loved him, how I feared him and wanted his approval. How I fed him sugar and opium.

[gemination]

‘A List of Receipts’

[gemination]

Your Wings

I am an angel: I ate pavlova for you / without you one bite at a time then all at once. I have mothered a durable love for you in divers weather, with fortune and against her. I am a golden loom spinning and reeling as I write your name again again, down against bones of paper and thread. I’ve traversed you like a moon, I’ve chartered and charted Berlin for your weariness, your parentheses eyebrows, your ghost effigy, your not-enough-ness. I angled for you out there in Saharan flame and I soldiered for you, every step, and I ate at the mouth of bitterness just to save you the last of my own soul’s sweet. With an ounce of anything, I tell you, I would do it again, for my existence is mission.

[gemination]

Beaches We’ve Been To

The muscularity of 'getting back', the sweetsick bent of time, striation for striation, a mode, a method and always a madness, the linearity that feeds itself, death unto life, always a reversal. Flower, oh Flower, my mean eyes cannot see you anymore but meek I feel for a face my fingers have known. There is motion and it unlaces us, my genes and your genes like a staircase spiraling in twine, this I imagine, this I inherit for you, inherent, my maker, my folly, my mine and my majesty. The illusion is all, Flower, my speckled wallflower, my 'ism', my voice in this spectrum of noise-deafness. Time is time again, after all. Alas and alack and woe, and sing with me, please, I say, and beg of me this thisness that can only be your own.