I
The man in the red hat took my photograph and
against two orders from the Congress of New and the
Association for Wrongfully Surveilled Women
As well as the pleas of the Society of Edges
shipped a polytechnic inscription of my left breast,
two magnetic etches of my under-skirt
across the sea to Aphrodisiac’s hollowed grounds
the thimp thumping of the predators with pray,
they say their prayers at dusk and I am thinking the
thinking is drowning, everything drowned from radio-head to the seconds after climax when
calling again, I thought we were over
you turning to eat pickled plums over the wet basin
And my photograph awash, cat-eyed genitals at sea—
we have been here before
you siphoning meaning relentlessly from
A picturebook of openings and me
in attesting to the faculties of neon signage
lost a portfolio of generally high-performing stocks which
In the chaos of our time abandoned everything.
hey ho! says the girl, the girl in the pictures who takes
all instances of frogs gone belly-up seriously
At least in the critical sense and from which she is composing a serial and mutinous document.
her mother calls from East of the first ocean
I saw you in the water she said with one heart worn
To rust. Where the other organ is concerned she didn’t know where it was and
forbid the daughter from relying on this false allegory
to get a point across or to woo a lover.
Well. The eyes of a redwood nymph only turn black once
and now we are in the business of collecting facts dead as
discount molten lava cakes.
II
Listen, the economy crashed last
night, me coating the bankers’ unwashed thumbs with imported
Mezcal somewhere south of Grand Central
And the roaring matchbox cabs with their antennae of unrealized
possibilities, which, in breaking I ate out
a countryside cunnilingus harkening back to olden
Days Sesame Street rave high up above Madison and the little
Uber icon flashing three minutes! three minutes! to
caller number two, skinny dick as my friend L
Lovingly calls him but when you know you know
and he has not given up our ritual of abject refusal
him saying I know this good place for bagels and me
Breaking an easel over the head of the conceit of morning-afters.
my tongue holds regard for Seussical saliva only I say to
hands tangled like cheapo Christmas lights on the highway
Restaurant-front, my mother and father in some cramped evergreen booth
that contained their sex and with it their lives.
I hadn’t know the contours of your pleasure she admitted to me on the phone later
And still the boys are waking to cybertechnic tunes of tomorrow
of the recommendations on shorting the market while
palaces of sashimi glisten untouched, perhaps ignored
The pink edge of which like honeycomb in its refusing to ascend to the
filthy dictums of salad at six.
I was trying to tell you becomes the stuff of
A particularly despotic atomization
and you are still considering the real estate market in Palm Beach
as well as the insular humiliation of asking a question, or if
Did you know punctures the timetable of our occasion and the untenability of
walnut oil-based shampoos in thin
little tubes
III
At lunch on the Hudson J recoils from tuna salad sandwich
slathered to perfection on artisanal brioche bun
They want similar things she tells me gathering
Green mayonnaise on the cuff of unrealized openings.
in yet another sense she is ill-suited to the demands of
a cruelty so facile it disappears in the milieu of
Early morning communications and scrawled tags screaming for you
when he arrives everything appears too soft to exist,
little numbers on Soviet-era watch awash in
A yellow bile. At oddly prearranged intervals of twilight we
woke damply to liver dancing across the tile, stovetop,
butter in rural England cross the crest of our mutual misfortune
And him saying something about the office culture of such and such plus
our shared responsibility in the deconstruction of the plum
a figure I interpret against my own best wishes literally
Or else the stuff of dreamsparks.
in the beginning, there was duende says Lorca. In the
end we realized we had forgotten to eat dinner and so
Stopping by Starbucks a move that so startled me I
ordered chocolate milk with a heavy dose of I’m not
going back in there per the custard that
Congeals on the bottle’s bottom and him having the gall to say anything at all.
IV
His name was Sigh everything he touched turned to
cuneiform arabesque side tables and the jocular first hour of morning when
embroiled in his own understanding took the next train to Katonah
In advance of the markets’ opening and in a sequence of mourning which began
peculiarly at dawn, the skylight over Manhattan High a figment of
boys’ dressing rooms at hometown Y and the abortion of cut-and-bake
Confections from a general landscape of malaise jockular social media presence and
everyone singing along to the realities of the failed state of California
or the concomitant misconstrual of X for Y which in other worlds possesses
The fine mist of ammunition-less tragedy. They told him to be a man and Sigh
obliging took a finger to small round tables for two and the glittery
junkyard of my dreams
Inside of which it made sense to stay wanting you commenting
on the status of lobster rolls or the occasional displeasure of
Amsterdam Avenue when I had something to say to you.
V
Funny too to consider when she knew—
and if upon waking recognized that everything was erasing itself
as it occurred, rendering obsolete the
Sly look on Sigh’s face when counting his rolls before eating
on the one hand and our sense of history as recursive on the other.
the problem a problem I admit mightily is that I wanted too much
And Sigh was still eating pickled plums by the wash basin
a move which had frightened his mother for weeks she
procuring a small book in which to record and the
Artifice of their first fuck hanging around Sigh’s neck like a
gift. It made him shudder and standing in the shadowlight of
mutual entrapment or a shared affinity for inspection
He made a deal with the seams of their most moonlike insufficiency
broke it off basically and said goodday, ma’am, I cannot pass
on any relevant information concerning the likelihood
of a seismic event on the order you are presently imagining
and for those reasons I must abstain lovingly from any
future discourse on the impressibility of your impending
Bright green heart attack.
VI
In the morning the old pine needles of their coupling
rustled in agitation as she took an old promo lighter to the
misgivings of coffee at six or, how in the knowable dampness of
Waking everything drummed on toward those olden sites of disuse
discarded foam laundry sheets, the fritter fratter of I
want to grow up to be somebody familiar with the matter
Or, that during a final meeting they skirted around the dripwood of
their dialogue tongues resting neatly in the gumminess of
unsewn finitude
An unabashed regard for the end and scrambled rumore.
now we and they are taking stock of the area prices for
a gut home reno, and in barely displaced dreams the
Contractor sings a strange tune of gestalt love, of the unsuitability of
wandering Columbus alone, looking to be saved by all
the articles of refuse dotting the boulevard and with them
That concave belly of this mutually thinning affinity.
VII
In the interest of time mothers move
stepwise and as for her a lingering in Mexico City
we lost touch some time ago, my mother reflects moodily. it is a
Monday afternoon and my world’s gone positively Popsicular
the grass was this euphoric entanglement of judgment
as I a king sat in the soft grass
And someone brought me watermelon sliced into precise little cubes
and everything felt round.
well that’s one version of it she says evenly
In some panhandle cabin the moon but a rakish visitor
stopping by for cookies. Her mother commanded her at the sink,
stop howling but she hunting for interpretive freedom
Splintered the task. Brought old light to new deeds in calling
attention to the weariness of form, a realization
which frankly undid me. And her taking a ticket to
The reeds of some unknown city where love was.
VIII
She went South for a visit to mother’s old port house when it became
apparent that Sigh was up to the same tasks, eating pickled
plums thinking about the potential for growth in the ethical
Landscaping industry and circulating pamphlets of ingenuity in
a purpled-over club, Canterbury, where your buddy’s
ex-painter still composes instructions concerning
The ebb and sound of lavender eyeshadow applied furtively
in hotel lobbies. I cut my cheek waiting for you I wanted
to hiss across the Internet, but something in me abided
And after all I had not yet known the fury of after hour dinner calls
or the structural inadequacies of passing reprints for the
yolk of all art.
Intriguingly, I always demanded the truth, she suggested
her mother one foot on the stepstool underfoot in the glowing
ether of suburban Houston, O haven of alien corpus
And the sushi fusion spots growing tethers in a land built on
the quietly receding architecture of a dream of everlife.
Her mother would not abide a characterless dream and so
Compiling manners in which to proceed in a blue velvet flipbook
argued sufficiently for the addition of
plums to the basket and as for her daughter
A little god born daily.
IX
It was a long winter eating my wristbones
you back in Santa Fe for Christmas like the telos of
my staying with a friend in Indiana, old condo on the
Near side and the premise of brunch in this renovated
farmhouse where blue corn quinoa
cakes were, drowned in gravy while I texted the diagrams of
My understanding the seaside as false and the painted metrics of
whether to return and eat little frosted cakes by
the seashore. Friend tells me it’s not so good to be abiding
These days and I have entrusted her with the mark of an age
when we roiled in cabs and ate very small pieces of
sushi in stillblack clubs along the barricades.
Truth be told, I miss eating out of the riverboy’s hands. Everything
felt good in the atmosphere of your wanting to leave
the party early for pancakes a mark which far from
Isolating the cause of her rapidly evolving vicinities only embitters
them in Charleston wine caseside.