Deer Spotting

I have been dreaming this whole time
or at least
some days I wake up and look around only
to find that I don’t remember arriving here.

Photographs are never accurate are they
moments becoming tangible becoming
something all to themselves.

Moments are never singular when they are happening.

You look like somebody I have not yet met.
When we hold hands I can taste
you through my finger tips and still
one day I may forget
exactly how your face falls.

This will not make you less of you and
I'd like to say that I won't save the pictures
or your voice recordings.

These only help me to pretend
that there is some way of keeping although

the most important parts dissipate
like droplets of color in water
long before you've recorded the ripples.

Of Fleeting Affairs with the Color Purple

In your pictures the forests changed into
green and yellow shapes, construed and blurred,
though I do not remember them that way.
How incorrect a vision becomes in retrospect
and yet we still wait sometimes for re-existence,
like tensed deer with prayers flung
silently into the air.

I have always been drawn to trees, but
these on the other hand, were not tall
at all reaching up with their deeply
knuckled branches towards the sky and the pigeons
who circled like sequins on string.

I insist on convincing you because I’d
like to imagine that we are not so different.
Listen:

I am only asking to steal back the bits
of loosed skin that have been shed
for the corners of rooms; to return home
all the empty mason jars in our kitchen.

A Craving

The treasure chest in the basement belongs to no one;
why do we keep such things
packratted into our corners, unlocked and empty.

People here claim nothing, big and small alike
words bob in the air suspended only by breath,
the great disappointment of youth
I am also guilty of.

Action: to lugclunk it up to my bedroom and
fill it with possessions: the pages of good books, borrowed
clothing snipped to bits like with shoe box art, or
to nestle into it like a cat in search of warmth,
who slinks in through the tunnels and crooks
formed by comforter when
a human body rolls over in bed.

What draws the sense to space yet leaves
the body craving comfort.

When I wake in the mornings,
gold eye slits blink from within the sheets.

Reminders on an Alien Terrain

An abundance of yellow for grass
if I were to assemble the backdrop:
an amassing of birds
like black and white
cookies with superfluous tails
collected on fence posts; not crows.
We find bricks and trees coexisting everywhere.
The familiar and unfamiliar
twining I am reassured
and imagine the river
is a slab of green marble between stone slopes.

Time inflicts on pigment; and
that which persists is not pertinent.
Desperation the cause of all that thalo paint—
Stop worrying,
what lasts will last.
Well, the museum was just a museum and

we prod the mountain like foreign thumbs.
Again and again, function performs.

In Search of the Duende; Also known as Gnomes

whom I have been having trouble finding,
I press my ear against walls
listen for scurrying.
I drift into sleep beside a neat offering
of toe nail clippings (his favorite).
No, he never comes.

When I wake I remember something
to do with spoons as a metaphor.
How am I a spoon!
This does not help me discover.


Occurencias: well I can’t speak for bright or witty
but most ideas are sudden and overwhelming.
These are the parts I have chosen to keep
from what my mother chose to keep.
An earthiness, a giving of sense
to the senseless. We begin a game of phone tag.

I have always preferred roots that arch from the ground
like the tell-tale toes of a murder victim—
the moment at which the gears give way.

And like of my grandmother and her plastic beauties.
Caridad del Cobre with your drifting sailors,
this is not so different a veneration.
A spineshiver that, unspoken for, still insists.

TURSCHWELLENANGST (German): literally 'threshhold fear'; fear of commitment.

We created the minutes to help us collect our thoughts
yet some of the bodies rejected time and water all the same.
Continuity: we did not both balance the narrow
walk together bobbing down unevenely with I instead
doublefooting the rough spots with my eyes shut.

TO PLUMMET: an act that orchestrates itself
[seems sufferable when compared to those three
long moments just before one
is forced into action.]

Names become unimportant;
to underline a statement and circle it.
And doesn’t the act negate the factness?

Our eyes receive certain random edges more willingly
shapes— a body spinning near an overturned
trash can the grass flattened in tiny moons—
not dissimilar from the methods expressed by
springforwards in pop-up books.

These were never really invented.

I couldn’t have kept the fish face, with its
parted lips shivering, from you if I had tried.
What even stays once it’s fumbled off of our tongues?

I burst into the bedroom and hide a few remaining
pommegranite seeds beneath my bedsheets but it’s no use,
nothing impervious to the act of listing.

A Small Loss

An ambitious octopus, one evening, suck
slurped its way out a decorative aquarium and
heaved its soft, gummy body all of three long
feet before finally expiring atop a blue area rug.
The next morning, touched by his valiant
efforts, Susan, the weekday receptionist at Montvale
Pediatrics, mounted a paper sign written in colorful lettering,
several inches above her sitting head on the glass
sliding window where
it hung for weeks. It read “Sleep tight, Ink Pot”.

And seven year olds,
grasping their mother’s hands impassively
as checks were signed or before loli-
pops were doled out, sounded it
out in undulating syllables “InK poT—
what’s that mean?” to which Susan would
always answer “For a friend
who’s seen better days.”

Then the mothers would smile
downcornered smiles with their eyes
squinting at child and then back up at Susan and
they would leave.

Invasive Exotics and the Body

Forsythia follow me everywhere
with their unavoidable yellow flourishes and
no, I do not think they are beautiful or want
them to mean anything other than
that they do follow me. By not leaving, I am
afraid that I choose to follow them too.

My body’s condition remains
tense; inflections do not come easily
but are inevitable the way
our young tongues have trouble giving
old words new meaning.

We find such a task excruciating
but others bare it. I enter
the Orb of Weapons room and am
transfixed. What else could I have
imagined but now all I dream of is
pulling them down from their
stuck spots and arranging them together
across the floor boards: anvil beside
nunchucks beside hammer, neat and clean.

The air here burns and clings to the skin
and I am startled when my fingers get
caught by a glitchspot as I reach
forward to clutch a kitchen knife.

Pohmelyatsya (Russian): the act of sobering up by drinking more.

Conversation forms a steady hum
at the dinner party and my mind
begins to talk to itself: why do we
get tired in shorter increments as
time continues. I think of saying it aloud.

In the distance one window blinks and
I watch over the head of a stranger sitting
across the table. Telephone wires
lacing to form interlocked triangles of
light within one illuminated rectangle
for a moment and then
it becomes black again.

People keep telling me that we write the same
story over and I agree but am not
interested in taking that any further.
I still dread repeating myself feel that
raw thoughts are like belly buttons,
or temples. And that night
walking home in a stupor,

I imagine rabbit’s teeth lodged
into my jaw not like paper but like
real live bone, pressing into my bottom lip.
I remember the girl in the painting
and realize that we do
wish for the strangest things.

Well mine did not make me fascinating as
they had she, with her chin pointing
towards the sky and her arms
flung above her head with insouciance.

Disambiguation and the Illusion of Intention

Anger swallows
a body whole and spits out the freckles.

Video game bleeping wafts in from
the living room as the subtlest reminder
and yet is excuse enough
to keep me distracted.

What's real
is that I am preoccupied by
the existence of everything.
I want a body to make me understand
completeness but I don't remember
it having been any easier
to imagine from the other side.
There must be something to it

The present is so impenetrable.

I walk down the street and
the buildings in Brooklyn are all
to be hugging eachother:
rows of worn brownstones
leaning very tightly against one
another's shoulders reassuringly;
we can impose signicance
on anything and

flattery is cheap. I don't mean it.

I Could be a Sailor

Tonight, mi amor,
un pedaso de velum. And
yes, isn't purple a color.

Life in a series of sucessions:
this morning I catapult in with
the wind and before I can leave,
I will want to kiss everything!

While alas, the you becomes
ever increasingly unimportant,
rippled green water, more similar
to the bumpy plastic in a marine life
display at the big museum
(fluffed gulls and all),
folds in on itself.

Chewing macaroon pulp,
sticky and hot, I overhear
the yellow brick building
creak mysteriously from within
and walk faster.

An echo in my brain:
lights on or off,
we can be naked or not be naked.
I am finding you difficult
to adjust myself to.

3. Koschatnick: A dealer of stolen cats.

I am not sorry, if
that is what you have come for.

The skopos: transcoding as
as a means of exposing.

Imagine that the bicycles in
the hall can feel absense, still I
do not regret you, or after
you because I do not
understand the purpose of purpose.

Nothing
A real feeling washes over the
body like a warm, sick bath.
Always there exist
oatmeal remedies,
but when is a question that
sits a the center like
a peach pit.

If i could explain how
a face can only become a new shape for
the original problem

Reads Backward to Avoid Endings

The heated blanket (felt-ish), a tall man sitting cross-legged, found cotton-blue ribbons between cushions: all not mine. These should be: the records my father's left.

We live in rooms filled with things that collect dust Mother why am I not also a bouy?
For the words thumping like tiny, irregular heartbeats beneath my fingertips, I think of
capillaries bursting like seams, like blood bugs from the new old sofa.

You are a picture frame
that i keep in the littlest denim pocket of my not wearable jeans in the closet. If I

could soak a space up into my pores and take it
with me into the next room, I would never fear leaving

or

abscond the vitamin in the upstairs bathroom, lodged between the vent
grates, the kind of thing small brotherfingers do without worry that:
wouldn't the cockroaches miss it, the lingering scent of mineral orange in winter,
in wall cavities.

The Evidence Left in my Tires

Before

water begins to build up

in our joints and it

becomes harder to move from place

to place:

ruminating is what we are doing

here is what we are doing.

You bring me a charm

that is also gold and black, and I find a moth

sogging in my soup.

Replacing mine,

this one has

come from somewhere else.

         here I want to ask but

you are across the table-

cloth sipping and 

wouldn't have noticed.

These are all remnants.

Like the way it comforts me to

know I am animal and not

a feeling I remember

feeling differently like

sandbox rocks

that sat in my little brother's

pockets.

You've burrowed a hole into the base of my

belly like a gyre widening, the

widening gyre?

Where there used to be an experience,

permenance and impermenance,

why it is, that we never recover.

They Said They Would Put Them in Years Ago

The problem with
speaking: as if anything could
be said differently.

A mouth without teeth,
eyelids not for blinking,
the feeling of being.

She became
a woman from the waist down.

Reception is key.
To be
like the bug specks on
her bedroom ceiling
that would exist
even after the floorboards were
replaced,
rotted through due to
a lack of

piping—
What of the french drains?

Oh and that
raccoon skittering at
the window one night from
the wrong side,

and all of
them sleeping.

Content; repeating it
signifies her desperate
need for
validation she was sure

that this time, they would furnish.

The Books You Read as a Child

Maggie
is a word that tastes
like peanuts:
a most memorable quote.

This is the setup-
please suddenly remember
that everything has a beginning
that you will not remember.
This is as similar to
her face—
which was wrongly led
by a nose and
not a chin—
as to understanding the
skimming of rocks.

Because my father didn’t take me fishing,
there are rules we won’t be following:

1. Endings are not ever
as important
as one would wish
(which would be
nearly inconsequential).

2.Trust your instincts.

Check, Check

Clues
not on paper are

not
on paper we exist
as outlines/splinters; un-whispered

Crude and tender and
there are too many scarves in our apartment
etcetera,
the cacti are dying—
such are the causes of Ex,

which had been
a mistake
in the making all along.

Who
buys new pots anyway?
Like q-tips,
and scribbles me
onto the list.