our voices are wedded to our eyesight. i sense you and that you are somewhere in the city. your brown eyes wide, or soft, watery. looking at a thing or at a person. my eyes think of you. losing a thought, or toasting it, or making a toast to it, or burying it up to its neck in cut grass. there was always so much glass in the way. when i take off my glasses i can see you more clearly.
i keep straightening you, smearing you in a line through my eye, stretching you to a median, to the place that separates me from the ground. a desert in bloom. circling language like an animal feeling in the dark for the right place. being sure meant nothing. our focused negative space. my first-person present-tense that is exhausting. my ears that are stuffed with tissue and damp, windblown umbrellas.
our negotiations and contradictions, our pre-orchestrated derailment. our veer. our dreary short with fuzzy, underexposed photographs of the neighborhood we took place in. i wanted us to extend past the outline of our bodies. of our fitful rhythms, our accidental alchemy. of all of our things, which were never ours, which were only mine or yours, or mine and yours, or nobody's, everybody's, but never ours.
our delusions, obsessions, the poetry of our deconstructing a story that was never constructed to begin with. our fictions, our fictionalized flight and fancy. the illegal inhabitation of our world. it was as though there were sheets of glass between us, between all the parts of us, disallowing us from confusing our bodies into one. but still, even now, my own smell seems to remind me of you.
i am eating this poem with a splintered wooden spoon, like cold soup, or warm milk, or dishwater. grazing my fingers along our rusty iron railing. peeking over the edge into the sea.
i conjure your image, or your laughter, to keep me company. your thick, gray promise of rain on the horizon that keeps me. i keep the perforated specimen bag that contains our glass heart. there would have been a great deal of rain at the beginning of the story
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