there is love in the way of you,
here.

and at the fair,
cotton candy sticking to everything you touch
           (my cheek,
           the inside of my wrist you can
                      taste my pulse –)

I lost you in a house of mirrors,

           which is to say,

I maybe meant to lose you.

Radical slow-jam cartography. Night-
               swimming in the wake of several broken

promises. This was a storm taking root
               in alluvial cognition. Snow-blind

fingertips navigating aspen bark stood no
               chance against the blizzard; gravitropism

is lost on havoc. The human brain is
               nature’s most obsolete supercomputer.

1. Mechanic blue skies reflecting the shape of my body de-bossed in your memory foam mattress.

2. No more honest surfaces here but a wide choice of hotels. The idea of tourists leaving the imprint of their skulls on mattresses all over the city is scary. I am curious about the potential massive shapes created over nights over bodies & nights heap over bodies against bodies until the trip is over.

3. A new hardness is felt when I think of our coordinates. Soft pores entangled like bike chains.

4. When my back bends like a spoon. Hitting jello at 200 mph.

5. Cause it’s zero to sixty in three point five. Smoother than a limousine. Can you handle the curves, can you run all the lights. It’s only about accepting the consequences of sounds and quoting Rihanna.

6. I want to know if I am really made of stone and sugar when I engage with the strength of the wind until my eyes cry independently of my neural tissues. Tears tasting like coconut.

7. Sometimes I am an endless coconut waterfall then.

8. I look up a survey to know which object I can be, based on my performativity. Halfway through I feel the stickiness of my muscles covered with price tags.

9. I choose to be a menthol capsule in a cigarette filter that you can crush right before you kiss.

10. But really when asleep, I am nothing but an oxygen thief.

I see the crow split open
when I should be watching the ocean,

a stain between frothing white lace
and shell-bedded skin. I can’t stop thinking

about the utter wrongness of its body—
talons curved inward yet still poised

for slaughter, the red wanting
where a beak should be, eyes and mouth lost

to another creature’s hunger. I wonder if it drowned,
those tarred wings wilting first, or if its neck

had given way like ribbon. I’m not sure
which one I prefer. Either way,

there’s carnage. I think I’m in love
right now and all I want is beaches

full of dead birds. A flood of limbs
washing up onshore. Seascapes sparkling

bright with bone. I know this longing well—
the same way a knife only knows

the yielding purr of softness
as the world curls around it,

how a shark only knows
bloodshed & swimming. This is

how bad it is: I need
someone else’s mouthful

of glossed teeth, or at least
something sharp in my throat. I deserve

a proper maiming. I hope I never
get used to the wound.

, the dungeon of shame
of hurt of home
the walls dark under tongue
a body of hurt a body of home
the bank, the limbs of shores
body new fresh hell
a moment in fresh hell
at the limbs of shores
give me 75 tough trees dotting my back;

light sweet petals
center of luck
let sweet time near here
let wish petals draft down