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.

Yuyin: The remnants of a sound that stay in the ears of the hearer

I visit the place where my father grew up.

A tall, beige building,

ornate with red

and yellow tiles. A mosaic

of time passing from

another world I am

an intruder, usurping memories;

rapscallioning.

This is the closest

we will ever come to an embrace

I think, pressing my

forehead

to the passenger side window

(which is) sweating with cold.

My brother is balding

and I am embarrassed to

see him:

this is also a testament.

He is here out of habit; I am grasping for one.

I live on the other side of this Peninsula

but the space the separates my Brooklyn from

this Brooklyn

is thick and rippling,

like churning through an ocean

of uninterrupted butter.

It takes years for me to get here and

next time I will row faster,

I think of saying.

There is a Ginkgo tree leaning

into us

from behind the glass.

She is heavy with leaves like

canary

wings fluttering.

I cannot help but wish for larger hands

so that I might wrap them around her slender

trunk and shake them free.

I am too familiar with

the stench of

fruit, chalky pink, seeds like wrinkled

plums that rest between the

gravel and sidewalk.

Everything her turns yellow first.

Act III, COMPLETE DARKNESS. Naked.

You say
We are communicating through unrelated
acts of insecurity

I say
Kiss me, I am beautiful.

You say
I am a mountain goat in the poolhouse, bucking

I say
I am one thousand wild horses.

You say
Artichoke flowers, a book of thorns incapsulated

I say
listening, always.

You say
I appreciate you

I say
but what does that mean?

You say
until the tide comes in

and turtles freckle the shore like dark, glass plates

I say
you say nothing.

and you say nothing