what / if

if my tongue catches in my mouth like a latch

if swallows twist down the horizon like

if i watch walls waiting for you

the scene on my shield will survive me. i am growing a good army in the center of

my chest. i am trying to shine

my heart open.

is this where we came from? all of us? this war story love story 

second story window staring?

i need to know some things.

  1. do our memories make love behind us and make new ones

  2. the color of the spaces between bodies (mine, yours)

  3. the nuance of weather (effects on reading, looking, interior sound)

  4. feral animals (tracking)

  5. how to squelch worry

my mother had an imaginary friend named Worry who lived in one of my grandmother’s pink plastic curlers. this is my lineage. this is the plant i flower from. if you need more context, look in your own grandmother’s mirror. notice how she is curled along the odd color mapping the ring of your eye, flecking outward.

the definition doesn’t count. we reimagine language in order to communicate.

we unhook our tongues from their closures and look inside.

squelch |skwel ch |

verb [ intrans. ]

make a soft sucking sound such as that made by walking heavily through mud : bedraggled, we squelched across the wet grass to seek shelter.

• [ trans.] informal - forcefully silence or suppress : property developers tried to squelch public protest.

noun

1 a soft sucking sound made when pressure is applied to liquid or mud : the squelch of their feet.

2 (also squelch circuit) Electronics - a circuit that suppresses the output of a radio receiver if the signal strength falls below a certain level.

ORIGIN early 17th cent. (originally denoting a heavy crush, a fall on to something soft): imitative.

we don’t, but we want to.  

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contraband sonata

undoing and being the mistress of my own undoing, a tie that un-binds, what does that mean? i sniffle myself awake, my room is filled with pollen from having left the trapdoor open in the night, where someone snuck in and unraveled something.

a glutton for contraband correspondence, i dispatch a small rebel-band of words, tiptoe, mousetrack, prayer-flags waving, something sweet and swollen with mischief, inching its way under the fence. pick-pocketed; a parley in the garden. exposition of our brewing coalescence.

how about i'll smuggle something and you smuggle something, and we'll trade.

jars and jars of stolen flowers, i keep coming across. sailing my little boat down the channel between our windows, the blocks that keep us wondering. so far i've only been collecting Devil's Paintbrush, alias: (ORIGIN  late Middle English : from Latin, ‘at another time, otherwise.’) Butterfly Weed, Chiggerflower, Fluxroot, Paintbrush, Posy, Orange Milkweed, Yellow Milkweed, Swallow-wort, Windroot--

so far also the memory of lilac. so far a chigger is a tiny mite who lives on or under the skin of a warm-blooded animal. so far always lilac for how it stirs up the middle of something, aching of innocence, abandon. how do you recall a smell?

scent-memory of flowers, a most important kind of memory. probably symbolic of dangling. re-collecting the scent of a someone, or a season you misplaced so many years back: leaf pile, bruised apple on the floor of the orchard. sharp way the sun smells in late october, a wooly elbow smell, a crisping between branches and their long shadows, looming taller as the sun dips down into four o'clock mountains. against twilight, the mountains turn purple. smell a cold starburst. last leaf smitten to its tree in a brilliance of crimson, preparing to fall.

i have a problem.

i'm pretty sure i was an animal in my most recent life. i'm not sure how to be in this one. big eyes filled with new blue moon or water, my blood swimming, ceaseless migration. my delicate drape of veins a netting, a webbing, a cradle. my clear heart hot, a bell jar for a lightening bolt.

here's the thing:

exposition |ekspə'zi sh ən|

noun

music. the part of a movement, especially in a sonata, in which the principal themes are first presented.

the title of my musical seems to be reasons for reaching or, trying not to get carried away, or i have a problem. here's the thing: when you look at me i see water, lapping at a dock, or a canoe, or a blueberry bush. been around forever. i'm trying not to see things i'm not supposed to. i'm trying not to imagine too far under, but the set smells familiar, can't help it. i hide a sneak of honeysuckle. i'm tiptoe, magpie. something under the skin. pirate on a life-boat, castaway extra. before i go, step into the light. tell me your name again, like we only just met.

stand up straight, and let me get a look at you.

 sonata |sə'nätə|

 noun

 a classical composition for an instrumental soloist.

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If your Nerve, deny you-

Go above your Nerve-

Emily Dickinson

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