Skin, tulips, poems, etc

Today you saw 6 dead armadillos on the side of the highway. You say it’s global warming, they’ve all walked north from Texas, north to Kansas,  dying in Wichita. 

Who would want to die in Wichita?  Not me. Probably not an armadillo either. 

If we spend another second here we’ll grow shells and scales on our feet. Bake in the sun because we couldn’t get north enough. 

I. I am thinking of a sound.  Grinding: teeth. Wood. You.

You: the forest of your body. I slip a spool of thread into my back pocket each time I  kiss you. Just in case.

Today I woke up and saw the pink thing.  I first mistook it for a petal,  or a piece of wax. 

Depending on the species,  a locust might emerge as often  as annually, or as infrequently as  17 years, but they expire approximately 5 to 6 weeks later- after 3 to 5 days, during which  the male and female mate,  the female will lay 24+ fertilized eggs. It takes roughly 6 weeks for the eggs to hatch and the nymphs to emerge. 

The summer of 1976:  in a quiet neighborhood north of Chicago, three children noticed  that the elm trees lining the block  were vibrating gently and had turned emerald. The local  locusts were experiencing  a particularly high population spike,  something to do with the heavy, stagnant  heat which stuck to every body  and brick. Nothing to do but  fuck and die, die and fuck, grow wings, sing in trees. 

The end of this particularly loud locust lovemaking  demanded intensive cleanup,  and the sidewalks were littered with  tired iridescent bodies,  fragile and dead  from their treetop binging 

A lazuli spring is 800ft deep.  I think about the time it  would take to  reach the bottom, or  at what point the bottom becomes the top, or depth the beginning. 

And here I stand, peering into a fraction of it all. Time, a moment, hunger, Yves Klein famously said he wanted to  sign the sky. 

This is a funeral. And a forest.  I love you

Morning slips into your mother’s yellow kitchen like silver-bellied fish into estuary. You drift across        the cold tile and I train only my eyes to follow you.         The devotion of my waist to your hands  is another story.        For the birds.

You crack the ritual two eggs, and wield the cast iron so delicately   it could almost weigh  nothing. I think of this yesterday.  Your hands  on metal, on me, on shells. They’ve taken you a 12th time, now. 

Anastasia est fleuriste qui fume des Lucky Strikes grâce à Mad Men, et le seul anglais qu’elle parle vient de Mad Men, je lui ai dit que la publicité n’est pas mon genre mais tu peux m’embrasser comme  Don Draper et je brulerai  toutes les barrières qui confondent  tes paupières ou pétales avec  ‘third-party data analytics’ ; 

Paris is shitty without anyone to share it with. Except  riding the 96 bus up Rue Menilmontant  even though it takes double the time as the metro,  crying in the citrus section of Monoprix for no reason in particular, the soprano singing Sì. mi chiamano Mimì  out of her open window on Villa d’Alesia and my face as I turn my head up, giggling from the top of a tree  in the Parc de Belleville with a pair of Australian angels,  the Braque room at Pompidou every Wednesday  because it’s free and geometry gets better with age, racing home  on the ligne 2 to make the sunset, Place des Vosges /  a stranger tells me asseyez-vous  because I’m getting off at the next stop, anyway  going to the market  early because that’s when the fish have the most to say.

Have you ever see the movie Frances Ha? I ask my eight-legged friend. The one about the dancer who goes to Paris by herself for a day, only  she is so jet lagged she sleeps until 4pm. 

I’m basically her, though  I would hate to be in black and white and  I think Adam Driver is weird and not actually sexy.

In that tartine place where we ate smoked salmon on pumpernickel, early October,         too hot  little cherry tomatoes left     on the table.   We left      

       I keep dreaming that you tell me again and again     you are  afraid      of loving me  too    hard.