“PART ONE: MIGRATIONS


40
The star anemone breached the plank with finality. A fragile thrill leading me back to the dismal courtyard from which I proceeded. I carried that faint pigmentation with me throughout the day, aroused by wasps maintaining their delightful facility like parasites mimicking a frozen constellation. Characteristic membrane; substitute for knowledgeable embryo. Somersaults. We adopted each other’s paranoias, then dismissed the decoy abdomen. Clandestine teeth, our arms of sibylline clause, a favored last resort. I lost my sense of gravity, gasped for air, maybe it’s your breath. This magnetism. I blew my nose into your t-shirt, cellulose, ice. Glass absorbs the color violet from the sun. If ever such a victor. Blushing thighs, snake tits, the eight of wands, the Pintailed Whydah and St. Helena Waxbill.


39
Came the wintry sanguine clot, hatching blindly toward obedience. For some extra cash I sold a jar of pickles and E.P. Thompson’s Poverty of Theory, four bucks each. This splendor is far from exhausting, as I reemerge each time with no lost cause, only short periods of wonder which build up to such a defeat. Thus, I choked (preferably) onto the gravel, and this ambiguous sentiment turned into the river


38
Might this fermentation draw the ill tempered stillness. A drowsy arm reaching, thoughts shaken into a jar by your gentle palms, boiled cherry uterus, glass. You hang from the light post, an astonishing ballet emerges. Let me kiss your milkshake thighs. Infinite! But the depths of this gaiety rejects time, as now the summer encourages an invitation. Sleepy, milken, pleasant. Let me be your man, your woman, your loneliness. Where else do I stain my gaze of seminal frenzy? Next we laid atop the xerox machine in the kitchen and shed tears that even the crocodile would find to be nourishment in this lush, familiar, and uncanny swamp. The new dawn. I sucked out your spark.


37
Cycads on his chest produce a jelly-like substance onto the flat of his palms. An ample reserve defined by internal rationale; the tongue depressor is busted, so use the spatula. With a ferocious matter of fact, his liaisons were innocent and he felt his ethics all warty and canonized, a salty key hanging from his throat. His eyes were green, were they blue? Salty thighs, trembling with arthritis, my shorts were stuffed with cigarette butts and magnolia petals.


36
I’m getting older. She kept maggots in her pockets, I was jealous of such luxuries. Your snout turned past the asylum. A limber blue smoke. A beacon of rebirth, ever so lazy. By the helm, old women, they built windmills. You’ll never meet them. Some fifteen hundred feet above the vile tombs, those city lights —singular! At sunset I followed the feathered serpents into the violet insomnia, determined to novelize their behaviors while shrugging off my premonitions, leaning onto the banister by the entrance of the scaffold, dropped down to the cement. I lowered my head — blowing smoke at the moths, introducing myself to the lamppost. A restless arid lowland is the Valley, with a climate so venomous.


35
I sang to myself for a while, imagined scissors made from ribbon, an extension cord running from my mouth to the boy’s thighs, up the steps of a ladder, a UFO inside of my uterus. I clawed at my intuition at the bottom of a stairwell. I’m kissing a duck while eating a sunflower. 


34
I found myself next, seated at the register, nodding at my boss whilst humidity loomed effortlessly. This is the last time I’ll work as a dishwasher but everyone knows that eventually you’ll find me back there, sorting cutlery and scraping bleach off the walls. I got diaper rash on my face, I said out loud while pacing around the Filipino barbershop with a dozen of those two-for-one deals tucked between my forearms. A pair of socks for my cousin, one for me too. Our selection, electric yellow and magenta. This dump of a store specialized in plastic wrist watches without batteries, glow-in-the-dark deodorant, ten dollar haircuts. Opalescent spiders resembling small crabs are watching me from the shelf of ratty oversized blue jeans, and the air smelt of sodden unmentionables.


33
Your eyes, by the tenor of certainty, bare adrift innocuous foreplay. My hands culminate a discourse. This disobedient temperature, like glass reflecting the wings of a moth chasing your gaze. This incarnation of my day is marked, like the end of a sentence; a pleasant obligation to assess. Our minds are often aligned, reconciliation at the pitiless cost of a million atoms, nullified in a stupor of purest caprice.

Yet beyond these distant migrations, comes an unexpected phenomena. An apparition hidden well. And might my intuition betray me, amidst this abysmal venomous wonder; that identifying manner whose suspect shrouded the innocence I returned, a veiled opulence at the calm; and at last  -yet I didn’t even hear you coming. A tongue beyond the tide. This vitality forgives me, but only once.

Our similarities govern the delicate belief that you anticipate familiar truths, as indications of spring has allotted to my competence. Had I expected such a rare and incongruous fantasy to reveal itself, I might have imagined to awaken on a nameless day, facedown, and using the leftover bread to wipe the matter from my irregular monologue. 
I recognized these musings. Yet your eyes, your name; the shifting basis of an ocean, a long vowel; a counterbalanced universe measured by my sacred (yet deficient) melody. I am now witness to your twilight gaze. Native, bejeweled, a direct translation of intrigue. The veil of dissolution is lifted, converted into lime, tempered particles of soil, squid. 

Limber and pleasant nucleus. Holy. Wild. Yielding a wetness. ”A bird so tremendous that it concealed the sun…” 
Someone once said to him, that on the fourth of June, the planet Venus would transit across the Sun. This had only happened seven times since 1639. Marital eclipse, we had met on this exact day. Entozoic worms, the climbing bittersweet tree -East of the Indies. Pinned down by my own devotion, and the sickly odd smell of sheets I hadn’t drowned in for far too long, yearning for the tears and I sing. One day I’ll say all of these things to you.


32
I became the exoskeleton of the hexapod, dragging my limbs between the anchor; trochanter, tarsus, tibia. The lights up in the sky kept us more aware of our surroundings, more than we normally would be, while on hallucinogens. The sound of the wind seemed to be at a lower decibel, I had double vision, you had taken to wearing my eyeglasses, yours broke when we were still playing in the mud. I’m leaving this house, the house where we were reborn. But no matter, we share the same heart. The same mind, so let me ride with this one, you’ll meet me at the corner of the street and I’ll take your hand. When I grow up I want to be a box of kleenex, or the milky way, a twin, a translucent globe.


31
Birds borrow one another’s dialects, but not by accident. Not by accident. Some, such as the Lyrebird or the Gray Catbird, have fooled many; as they convert their own distinct ballads into mimicries of birdsong from other species; to divert enemies and invasive males. Meanwhile, they do this to attract a nearby consort. Procreation was priority. There was one particular bird though, one which I knew I would come to discover, one I couldn’t shake from my mind; with it’s disorientating cry, vibrant plumage and fidgety personae —a complicated creature of the family Phasianidae. Such an aberration draws a crowd wherever it may appear. Absentmindedly seducing its prey, an abstract gravity about its perch becomes evident to onlookers.

Might I reconcile my most recent reports on the shy, terrestrial, fleshy horned Indo-malayan bird, as from Bhutan to Uttarakhand I may never frequent. Avifauna of Khajjiar Lake (district Chamba), Himachal Pradesh, India; where the evergreens reign. This specific landscape is said to be an arena that houses 77 seasonal species of the Muscicapidae family. And also to be noted, this influx of such species varies betwixt winter and summer, as one might come to imagine. Corvidae. Picidae. Accipitriadae. Facts on the disciplines of zoology are much more available than I had predicted, in fact there are various sources ready for consumption.

A gorgeously eccentric creature...it’s euphoric glance and frail crimson belly leaves one with the feeling that if perhaps a ceremony to celebrate its spasms of wonder might be organized, only then will its enormous beauty reign over us larger, more “educated” schmucks —we pace while gawking at such zoological harlequins. Rumor had spread that this breed has become globally threatened, and O! How I had longed to see one in person. 

Your voice is a bell breaking ash from the sea.


30
Lay low, magnificent bravado. Just for a few more minutes.

A shroud of oblivious grasshoppers took flight below me, decorating the abstract sphagnum moss that sheltered the floor in diameters. Someone in the kitchen was clearing their throat, and that’s when I knew where I was.

The door handle turned to jelly, and out my mouth I spat four red triangles, each the size of a penny. I examined them in my palms, then dropped the mucus covered specimens to the ground and fell through the front door; as if it were made of water. Landing flat on my back onto the porch, I laid there for a while.

“I ate too many fireballs in the middle of the night. Sorry about that.”

“No apologies necessary. The other day I dreamt I was listening to an orchestra playing from within your belly. I was resting the side of my face onto your stomach, for what felt like decades. My arms around your waist…”

A stairwell had appeared, beneath the dining room table, which we climbed down cautiously. At one point my foot got caught in the young man’s mouth, and he began to recite a poem while telling me first off, that he was reading the lines from in between my toes.

“How can you read something so tiny?” I asked him.


29
In 1974 the second printing of R.D. Barnes’ Invertebrate Zoology was released. Extensive illustrations, adaptive morphology, evolutionary origins. On that same night the local wet nurse had fallen asleep to a tornado watch, her friends —suspicious of the current precipitation— were talking about how to cure bronchitis. Her name was Cynthia and she smelled of eucalyptus, other times like garlic or suppositories. I’m falling in love with conditioner, by the way. That dull lather —the way you drop the bulk of it after squeezing it down and off your scalp.
”

“PART TWO: THE FERN I ATE FROM YOUR MOUTH

28
A loaf of multigrain bread, still frozen. A pack of yellow straws, toe nail clippers, tampons (unused as far as I can tell), three jars of buttons, our legs in hibernation. Positious advert species, windshield made of dust. He dropped the phone and I moved closer from the broom closet to the hallway and back to the kitchen again, watching him hop around in the backyard, juggling crabgrass.


27
—We shoulda parked somewhere with more shade.” She mumbled, sitting up now, her jeans stinking up the car, the ones she pissed in the other night. Smells like hell in here, but it was home. Advantageous was the sky. That miracle wilderness which crippled my universal modernity, observed by my subsequent grin.

Bacteria, the architecture of a gentle tongue, the sleep of surrogates. I was offered, for once, a freedom by that which I’d awaken to from my drivers side front seat. This very sound, the sun, rose to a degree I could understand; as it’s warm aurulent glow caressed my tired eyes.


26
At night he enters my dreams -it’s daisies that I paint onto his belly. I shave his armpits while he sprays his warm milken divinity all over my toes. He says I taste like pink guava. Then I wake up, alone, calling out his name, wishing he could hear me. Wishing he was there in bed next to me, reading out loud from a book on petrified forests.


25
Late November. I could hear the elevator, no longer hushed in the background —as if it were the first time I’d ever noticed that bizarre sound of metal and hydraulics merging with the restlessness of my own breath. How long had I been living here now? If I could pronounce the residue correctly, penchant toward passerine, would he still deny me of this surrender? No. Not this time around. This is really happening. Lost in a sleepless city, one which has accumulated unforeseen mechanisms toward its own collapse.

I’m looking out past the Ersa drosos, as if it were entirely foreign to me over the past decade. And then, she emerged. From behind the elevator doors.

As a teenager I excelled in both math and the sciences. Biology was a rush, despite my bad habit of falling asleep through those long-winded lectures. No time for regrets. I have some new friends to tend to, here. Maybe no real time had passed at all, just a minute or two, where everything from all of those years played its solemn dirge into my subconscious. Distracting me once again.


24
Bromeliad. Brachiopoda. Bryozoa.

”What have you got there?” Cried Mosquito, nursing on my abdomen. A three quarter moon. The great misunderstanding. And I brushed the snow from off his violets. He lives in the sky, the man of my dreams. The great river of celestial perseverance.

We made a meal of sorts, had sex with the VCR. Anticipating our reflections in one another.

I hid photographs of him in the cellar, by an open window. Roses swirled around each photo and whenever I’d come to visit, the flowers asked me about my father, and when I’d almost gotten caught stealing food for him.

Mighty redemption. In your arms. Foreboding a comfortable bed.

When I was a boy I jacked off with warm cinnamon batter.

The seeds I spit onto the floor.

The fern I ate from your mouth.

The narrow mudflat. Every ninth wave is heavy. The jetties, observed for mornings, headlands at Coyote Point and moribund.

Yet deliberately, the wind from the northeast, the crest of the sun adjusts the movement of the halibut. I was told the surface water would decline, shifting the hatchlings, as the trow breaks at the tide. The waves are constant, the activity of an earthquake on the ocean floor.

My elbows are slough, like the Elkhorn. Examination: I’ll never forget your eyes that day.


23
I sat across from you, and for the first time, all these centuries, I was sure...you licked my shoulder and said I tasted like a dream you once had. Later we were on the couch, you were sitting to my right. The only sound which occurred to me was the way your legs kept shifting from under your ass, and against my hip.

Your mouth I worshipped and ate from, as if inside and wrapped within your tongue was a soft cherry-like pearl. Only a minute had passed and we’d lost the ability to breathe, so we sat back onto the couch, facing the open bay windows. Beyond us was a field.

I moved my left arm across my chest and slipped my hand into yours. I gripped your wrist, rubbing the perspiration from your palm down your forearm, scarlet appetite. Your resplendent member emerged. A sublime eruption. I found a tape of you singing something in German. I felt so lucky. I was slipping around in cat vomit.

As I was braiding your armpit hair into strands of silk, you kept drawing circles over my knees. 


22
—was I was a concubine, a heroine, a porcupine —sweet cherry scented breath, delicate eyes, lived under a gasoline manufacturer, fed off of rattlesnake semen and pill bug excrements.

Was I a virgin rodent, or was I one who had lost my litter to a broken sprinkler system that went off when I was out hunting for worms and flies to bring home to my pups, only to return to them being drowned. Their bodies still soft. Or maybe I was an insurance salesman who’d never fallen in love, waiting for someone to discover me, renew my species, take me home. We all want that feeling of being discovered by another person.


21
We already picked out a suitcase. This was the last time I saw you, mom, wearing a drugstore tank top and a cold chain wrapped around your burglar alarm, a nickel for a view of the moon, your pants were stained. For lunch we sat on the train and ate chili fries, we didn’t have any money left on our debit cards, the ceiling was rotting away above us. We could have gotten the grilled peppers and fried chicken. The waitress was pregnant, her girlfriend managed the register -she didn’t drink whisky, never liked the taste of it, wasn’t sure what all the hype was about, she liked lemonade on Saturday nights and hot chocolate on Thursdays, sold her car to pay off some old utility bill. Later in the morning she hit on me, was eligible for parole in the spring she confessed.

I don’t know where we were, somewhere outside of Utah. That’s what happens when you smoke speedballs for forty years, mom. Your voice got so deep. Does acupuncture really help with allergies? All of my cameras are broken at this point. That was some really cold milk, it’s better warm, rusty nipples squirting, similar to Dioscorides, or a Greek physician, fifteen hundred years later they assigned RNA molecules into evolutionary data management, inosculating mangrove limbs from a cluster of Box Elder saplings.

Had I configured your trajectory? I’m feeling dizzy, the crickets are loud. Tiny blimps suckling off the crotch of my dirty pants, I’m not wearing them.

For a few minutes we got side-tracked, and talked more on the topic of fears. She said she hates sand, her feet in the sand, embedded in her eye sockets, has never gotten onto a plane, has a sister she hasn’t spoken to in over ten years.


20
The boy kissed my face, then moved on to the torn fabric of the lampshade. It’s from the 1940’s...I said. Watching him, bewildered, as the beads from the lamp stuck to his tongue, fell down his shirt, tumbling off his knees, landing into the copper pot at my feet. With cracked cortex alumina, cobweb-like, forging my mesozoic breath  -roving, salty. Thick like tentacles, we then became entranced by the geology of this quiet, humble storm. 

—yet a familiar sound crept across my spine. Let me first blush viridian and eat macaroni and cheese off your belly! -Chartreuse tongue, magnified by the sound of your absence.


19
When autumn came, I beat the fat into the serpent, sold my wife a brown ribbon, pollinated the cycads with my sorrows. The orchestral delirium. Torpid embalmed rot in my palms. I chewed on the root resurrecting a sixteenth century appetite.

When autumn came, I was a flower. Ammodramus savannarum. Veiled at the dawn, ambidextrous. Expect this. Mirror proclaimed, drink my flower. Flower. Baby my roof, is on fire. Fire.

Unimaginable specters rise, as a slumber on the corner of the boulevard subdued this black hearthen vigil. Swarms of flora at the mouth of this swift passage into adulthood, (remains) uninhabited. My impatience blessed this pitiful fault. Drag me down to the enclosure. His cum was black as soot. I made money with my feet. As you exhaled ruby discs of intrinsic value. Despite all jargon, reduced to a bad habit. Undiscovered primitive narrative. I feel so alone, here. It can no longer be uniformed, this promise, unless given flight by the arachnids. Entangled, suspended from your belly. Improvised demigods nauseated at the shallow. My stomach navigates inertia, the distortion of a bad dream. Dizzy vortex in the pink meadow deflects the rapture of optimism. And beneath such generous fortunes, regardless of its sex —my presumptuous calm further casts a faint spell. A passing shadow. And the allegory was staged. My lips were chapped and there were very few good kissers out there.


”

“PART THREE: SLEEPWALKING

18
I caress his ghost while he chews on the side of the chimney, and he is bursting. How do I let him know I have no demands? That I surrender. My eyes turn to the salamander as we cry an ancient song, anticipating these fragments, rushing toward the endless dawn.

At night he floats above me, watching as I put on chapstick and brush out my hair. I imagine him sleeping inside the roots of a tree, and I worship the way his legs sway above me, he kicks me in the face by accident. My blood is warm and I get some into my eye. He laughs, and we kiss for what could have been real this time.

I am bursting, my face moves into the back of his thighs, I’m drooling and he catches each drop with the underside of his feet. Must we fall asleep now?

I wish to be a victim of such blessed venialia - but If I may, instead, excuse them as plain and subtle encounters; accepting such fortune by accident. If he knew how I felt how would he react? I am no longer frightened of knowing something so pure. There I lay, my glasses somewhere below me in pieces.


17
One of the geese had discovered a small coyote and became rather nervous of its presence. We managed to grab the coyote and cooked it along the top of the burning trash, a meal for ourselves and for the apprehensive geese.

Proven unlikely, by all means I could suggest an impediment of envisioned scant. Smoke in my eyes. We left the yard and made our way to his bedroom. I leaned back into a small metal chair in the middle of the room and watched him make the bed. He fell to the side, upside down, with the sheets gripped tightly between his toes. The chinook from the window lifted the fabric as he stood on his palms, my legs peering through the lift and collapse of linens, I closed my eyes too. Feeling the impassive draft of his waning sheets, prosaic utensil, submissive devotion.

“Did you want to spend the night?”
“Your bed smells really nice. I like the way you look, laying there in it.”
“So stay.”

By sunrise we would walk with our empty baskets, gardening gloves tied at the wrists with yellow threads, flirting with the yams. We had set out next, to visit the botanist and her wife. The botanist was an astronomer as well, known throughout the town as the only one who would take a nap at twilight, legs elevated, for no longer than 25 minutes. Her wife was a painter, who barricaded herself on their roof.

The Dobu of South East New Guinea would be furious. As would be the botanists’ wife. As to them, as well as the Dobu, the swelling of the yam symbolized the fertile and bloated impregnated feline polygamist. The frogs were placed safely in the tiny aquarium, all the muck from their ceiling fans were removed, and we even set the table for dinner. They were pleased with our work, and tipped us this time. 


16
Part One
Samphire, noun, fleshy sea-coast plant; glasswort.
Sarangousty, noun, waterproof stucco.

Part Two
The ‘offspring’. Research the counterpart of Nystagmus; bright reflections from water or metal may become distracting for animals, fear based, confusing, similar to their reaction to shadows.

Part Three
I envy the black dove, the emerald spider and its delightful synonyms. Scarlet seed, warm latitudes


15
I met myself last night, in a dream. I was kinda nervous. I think my breath smelt just awful and I was looking for gum beneath the ledge of a window; stretched out to the end of the room. Out that same window I saw myself, pacing, in the large open room below me, awaiting my arrival. It appeared that I was nervous on that end, too. What a relief. When I met myself, I asked me if I spoke any other languages, and I said, “I’ve been studying the slavic languages recently,” Then I replied, “What kind of job would that be, for translations?”

I was on fire in my heart, and asked myself next what I had thought about death, cleaning products, and misunderstandings. I was a better kisser than I’d imagined, too. Eventually I discovered I was out of cigarettes, and so was me. We gave a damn for a little while, and negotiated who got to take home all the cigarette butts. Each one was worth a punch in the face.


14
I woke up, immediately lucid, sucking on a chocolate bar. Must have fallen asleep with it in my mouth. Oral fixation as an adult is something that no one ever wants to talk about. They put on their gowns made of old knit blankets and went for a swim down at the tiny frog-infested watering hole over by the train tracks. Really just a gnat infested puddle, but on LSD it was far from a spot to sell tricks for food.

I wanted to play, I rang the bell. The bell around your neck.

To expose a sense of ethics as a forced impersonal hysteria. Female hysteria? Male hysteria? I’m shaving my mustache, in front of the mirror too.
“Methyl-parabens? Fuck.” He spits into the jar and tosses it onto the fire. Now he’s wearing all blue. The other day it was various shades of salmon.


13
She poured chlorophyll down the throat of the soft tower that laid at her bedside, pulsating and quietly uncoiling into her hair like Nietzsche’s troubled bowel movements.


12
How do I begin to grieve the loss of someone who I had forgotten existed in the first place?


11
Now she moves like a blueprint neutralized in a microscopic shuffle at the corner of the bed. Where she always sat. Her spontaneous nature was increasingly vibrant, although you couldn’t get her to leave the house for just any reason these days. She had to be real intrigued. We found the finest pinks scarves, silk even at times, what used to be a stereo equipment shop now housed the relics of those who resided in the valley back in the late 1800’s. All her dreams were tangled into each thread, she danced with trails of dust from a hundred years back. Her own mother would have been taken hostage. Ceramic cranes, glazed white, why…her hands looked so frail, veins protruding as she finished her sentence.


10
Every year I return to you, we kiss, it rains, I sleep over, sleep in. My thumbs are stuck between my legs, and in my pocket I had the first leaves of fall from last we spoke, orange and yellow. Never are these flavours exhausting.


09
Did you just piss in my new crock pot?” I looked at him while taking bites from a brick of sharp cheddar cheese.

Queenie. She spoke Latin, Mandarin, learned those in college, moved on to Russian and Hebrew in her thirties, taught Miroslava Icelandic last year. It turns out we weren’t related, which meant that Beatrice wasn’t my mother or my surrogate. I guess I got a little excited for the big news, my life would have a whole new meaning, and all of these shit jobs wouldn’t be so daunting. Liverish, bilious, irritable. Ljupka Dimitrovska, I like her. Born in Skopje, Macedonia during the last week of July, in 1946.”

My samsung wet dreams were far from being over.

“tlilick tlilick, tik tuk zee” cried Kabigat, suckling the honey from your throat, Miti and Eme’mqut, one for her blinking trumpet. You wiped your face with a dish sponge, Asplenium cordially hid our gaze, as tempting as his sudor despite his contradictory affirmations.

I was eating ice cream. Vanilla. Although I had expected strawberry. As a boy I had memorized my mornings well, my vision polestared, bees swarming against the window. Your eyes, a glare leaking in from seethed glass. I wanted to memorize the rings of your anechoic buccala, preparations for the thawing of spring. Silently mimicking your elongated mammalian throat. Acute swelling of ants and bemused sweat. Don’t stare at my double chin.


08
If you asked me a few months back, if I was prepared for what this year would entail, I’d without hesitation tell you unabashedly yes. I have been ready for this my entire life. But, would I have simultaneously believed what was about to take place…no. I don’t think I would have believed you, even if you provided me with proof. As I never did put much faith into dreams. I had always imagined miraculous happenings belonging to others. All this time, I was wrong.


07
My brother is doing the splits and bathing in the giant silver vat that’s stained with grease, placed beneath the cabinets —where the cups are kept…so I was searching throughout the house, I entered a room with high ceilings, it’s snowing outside, I have on a black sweater, shaved head. 

There was that one girl used to feel me up behind the trash bins at this old apartment complex I used to live at. Watching the ants on my arms as she would climax, her giant puffy skirt blocking her face from mine, which I rather liked. I didn’t care to see her face at all, and her breath was always sour. I didn’t like her one bit, but her father was molesting her and she needed an outlet. I was four years younger than her, even at that age I felt bad for what she had to go through. I figured it would be an interesting story, even if it was without my consent. Once in a while some roaches would be crawling around in her hair, but I wouldn’t say anything about it. I hoped that they would lay eggs in her scalp and she’d leave me alone once and for all.


06
Other esoteric facts that come into play: the failure to be spontaneous is how we lose our sense of self. To apply this philosophy, I figured in the new year I’d take more time to tell bedtime stories to the wet arachnids that nestle themselves in my bucket of dirty linens. I’ll even pretend to recognize someone on the street and tell them how they gave me my first kiss. I could become a superintendent somewhere and mutter obsolete dialogues to a plate of sliced cucumber. The salts of vanadium has beautiful colors.

Mercurius. It’s Wednesday. You asked me if the hounds had a rash. I was never interested in celebrating a soothsayer —steadfast, ferocious. The roof of my mouth which fell into the open sea.
“Are you asleep?”
”Look, I’m no altar boy.”

Wide-eyed kids with blue shoes and bus passes hanging from lanyards, their tongues stamped with the hollywood sign. A tall bald headed 20 something walks around in the antique shop in a tutu, blabbering gibberish and holding a stuffed animal, from Brooklyn, looking to “hit the beach” tonight. Cell phone kiosks. People jogging through car exhaust.


05
Cherry 7-Up tastes like laundry detergent. Lost not a moment, lamentations from the cardinal, and other places I’d once visited.

Wandering into requisitions, procuring a pillion for her seat on horseback.

A curious womb. “Better hands.” Spoke the Sphinx.

Maybe eggplant? The smell of smoke, flames, the sirens wailing, the neighborhood burnt down around us. We ran outside, watched the smoke gather round us.

He leans over onto the toppled fridge, a crowbar in his sleeve, ears bleeding tulips, jars of sausage. What did you inherit from your parents, he asked me. Sensitive skin. We sat on top the refrigerator, our limbs taking turns creating tide pools, seizing the unsinkable objects, writing utensils stuck in our hair. Ingesting this wet century. We cocked our heads awaiting the swallows, watching centipedes and mice float to the shallow.


04
We meet starvation on our way toward the river at Skyline Trail, where we stole LSD from a woman who called herself Hamilton. The crucifixion of our previous selves. The body of a dog we found abandoned in a mesa being taken from the site of his accident, a mouth-full of wild bees, we named him Trixie. The burial of Trixie as we lost our minds and most of our belongings. We found one another shifting between spells of euphoria and a new type of mental exhaustion. For the most part we’d collect specimens from each area, and fill our notebooks with details from all the plants we were able to now research —at an extent at which we’d not yet been exposed to when living our previous domesticated lifestyles.

I washed his hair on Saturdays, then on Sundays he did mine.

5am. Here, in the dark, wondering where I went wrong, as a flame from a candle burns a hole into the roof of my car. I’m thumbing through an event catalogue, live Japanese folk music downtown, lectures on state prisons. In the early dawn all I had wanted were some fresh strawberries, maybe a greeting card I’ll send off to someone eventually. Steer now placid species. 


03
Caterpillars were the first things on my mind, each and every morning. As if they were a song that I had memorized. I hadn’t seen them in days now. Perhaps I have been a little busier than usual this past week. But something was missing, even so. I stumbled into the kitchen for some hot tea, a little cereal. But no milk this time. My computer is kaputt. I rather prefer my steady pile of newspapers. Each one sat patiently awaiting my arrival, as I approached the corner of the dining room table.

It’s Wednesday morning, almost 9am now, and the door bell rings. Was I expecting anyone? Paper pterodactyls.


02
The arrival of this entity came in the form of a package. Rather, a small box which was painted red. The latches were worn, as if left out in the rain for miles. My hands trembled.

I traced the letters of your name with my tongue, and noticed a hidden scripture behind the return address. I ripped off the label and desperately translated the note, which was not only in a language I had forgotten, but it was written backwards in its form.

So I opened the box. Inside my stomach was a fire that whispered my own name, but in yet another language I had long ago used to speak.

And my eyes went crossed.

Turning the pages of your diary, sorting through photographs. I loved you still. And you knew, all this time. My eyes were like laser beams. I couldn’t keep my mouth from sinking ajar. I opened the portal, and there was no turning back. You are inside of me again, and you will be my slave until our last breath. And I yours.


01
Today we settled on a ceremony that we used to practice, years back when we first met. We ensconced ourselves alongside the sloths and the Guarani, defecating in peace. Imagining if the earth were to split open, summoning a great flood to subpoena our ancestors. We crept out from the armadillo burrows and made tea out of our shit — the typewriter keys, sleepwalking again. A heavy night of transcribing some old science journals for me, delirious.


00
Our own story was already written, cured at high temperatures aeons ago. There are only a few of us who get chosen, this isn’t a universal happening. Do you believe me just yet? I’ve almost convinced you, but at first I had to review the transcripts myself. Adjust my antennae. Assistance from lemurs with but one demand. I keep thinking how, perhaps —they knew about us all along. How else could they have predicted every aspect of me and you? I call out into the ether, my bones caressed by sea urchins. Coral beams embroidered onto my tender spiraled collapse. Peculiar are the mornings most of all.



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