november lover,

“are you sure you’re good with me staying over?” you ask. i’m painting my toenails bright bright red. you’re digging through your duffel bag. my cat won’t leave you alone.

it doesn’t need to be asked, so i don’t give an answer. i correct a smear with my thumbnail.

here are some things: once you told me to feel your hair, and when i reached out, you closed your eyes and leaned in.

“i got new socks,” you tell me.“check it.”

they’re fluffy alien socks. “job lot,” you say, “three ninety-nine.”

and then, grinning, you pull out a second pair. “So we can match,” you tell me. “they’ve got nonskid footies.”

here are some things: when i was six i once spent an hour coaxing a spider into a cup even though i was terrified. when i first met you, you smiled at me and i knew, suddenly, what it was like to be a spider in a cup.

you laugh at the look on my face, “I know,” you say, “i’m your best friend and you love me.”

define the scary in my skull / sharp teeth like trileptal binge / you’ve got me by my work ethic / you’ve got me by the veins, blood & all…you don’t know the half of it but you cut apart my bones anyway / magazine-feathers flap flap / asking, begging, for xanax dreams again / but dull-eyes don’t get epitaphs /

you have what it takes / rainwater tuesday and it’s not even 1:00 / i’m strangling my own dynamics, trying to dredge up all of your silver, unpublished secrets / there just aren’t any anymore / the gutters sing like forest fairies, orgies & all / there’s no sex in these waters, just lonely elegies that never found a home • july 16, 2018

// another dead july, nothing moves

not even the desert sunflowers, sieve dream, dust and pebbles and white spirit horses lurking past prairie //

the engine coughs like old bill did when he visited me, morphine sadness and addiction and sickness, following

– the train’s dying on its wheels

deadmanwalking / crawling –

// it’s a long way down and everyone’s talking and it’s all too much and it’s all so surreal and there’s an overwhelming sense of loneliness & oblivion //

but that’s just how it works, doesn’t it?

the fires of older cities gasp, break, talk. there’s nothing left to say and so much left to do. for all of us.

the antinous mondragone, the marble smooth and cold like winter ink. you remember it was unpacked with lipstick marks on its cheek; someone at the louvre with lips smeared cherry red had made herself hadrian and kissed it. you remember thinking, who could blame her?

sappho and erinna in the garden at mytilene, captured by simeon solomon. it’s been a while since you’ve cried at a painting. you’ve gone to museums armed with ways to analyze what you’re seeing; you know what clouds are saying, you know the language of flowers. but you looked at the painting of those two women clouded in their embrace and didn’t even realize you were crying until you looked at your notes in your lap and the pen was smudged with tears.

a bouquet of sunflowers, held together by dark hands & brown twine. stems cut too long, faces larger than herself & still searching for the sun. 

picasso earrings. a melted flow of looping gold, the same curved cheek from two different angles.

blood splatters across clipped angel wings & the look in her eyes screams heavenly art. 

both brock & hampton. mosh pit dancing in platform shoes. bangles on her wrists, arms in the air. 

books & essays & pages & paper splayed across a cafe table. favourite quotes highlighted carefully & lines of poetry scribbled in the margins. 

three wishes from a genie. polishing his lamp in return, with the sleeve of her yellow turtleneck. 

a wedge of lemon floating in a decorated teacup. eyes tracing its citrus beads; breakfast smells like honey & lavender.