Steps 1 and 2

Step 1

Mistake me for no one else. Look me up in the foreground when the screen freezes and the tree’s breezes. Look me up in the index, at the after party, in the third row. Look me up just beyond where it’s wet, where the show stops reaching, but the phases and the fog start stopping.

Look me up on lists that YOU made a long time ago, when it was only our fault. Look up at me when you see me for the first time and every time after that is another first time. Look me up when you forget that dynamism, when looking all around is fruitless. Look me up past the crescendo and into the calm. Where the bridge is, I am. Look.

Step 2

Where there’s a ring, but there’s no way there would be. When we are all tall, to the finish line, the crowd grows on the backs of those whose hips pop and knees lock at every town. I look forward to going under, I look forward to the scar, I look forward to scalpels and saws, and pithy little landmarks, to respite.

Forced through a thick layer of garbage (and there was very little underneath), we were very much the leader. We were the tightest pants, we were huge disappointments. We stared, ashamed, but unable to help it. Our teeth were grey, our legs crossed in discomfort, our wives by our sides. We sipped, gesticulated, pantomimed, and have otherwise laid motionless beside tables. The bigger, better shoes, the longer torso, the wrong door, the wrong sign. Do I say something because I feel responsibility? And then I spend long enough somewhere in some place, and in that place I learn the rules and I want to follow them?

Step 3

What did you look like when you fucked my husband? No one is perfect, but what did you look like?

February, 2015

I’ve looked for the prompt, I’ve waited with the best of them, for the waiter. For the menu. For the last time at the very least.

I don’t have your brow. I don’t even have that much sweat. I don’t bray. And I had very little to say in January. For the last time.

I’ve rubbed until fleshy flexes and tenses and changes against my own touching. At the very least.

I wait for my ankles not to be cold, but to still be uncovered. This is not a revelation. It’s not even pretty.

The Famous Person

I wanted to tell the story of the famous person I met who I did not know was famous. He was a writer and a director and an artist and a predator. I told several different versions in several different ways and let my audience guess to whom I owe my nonchalance, my air of mystery, my disinterest in the profane.

In Leo

I am not fodder for or part of a collection of another award-winning story. I am not above being genderless, or so I am told, and must then be too vacant for you. I am not well-curated collections of photographs for public display and dissent for you to earn a reputation for your eye. My face belies my talentlessness. So then, for whom is the bell distant enough to be flat intonations of a grand romance that never had a chance in the day to day? I am prudent enough that I can refer to all my yesterdays as my younger years. And everything I cannot say out loud, my penchant for ruining the punchline, my inability to twist and turn and otherwise weave a decent tale, both my fear of and desire for performativity, I will write it all down.

In December

12/03/2014

The buoy isn’t the question – it’s an entire fucking language. And the salt in the water doesn’t do much for thirst or for hunger. It is simply a sensory experience.

12/17/14

Whatever fence it is, may I never be a story you tell.

12/18/14

Beware of hungry love. Beware of easy confessions.

12/20/14

It’s not my heart, is it? It’s my bowels. And eventually I’ll empty. Time will empty all open wounds. I’ll bleed out and somehow fill it back up.

Because I was wrong, you know how to reach me. I’ve left all of my emergency contacts at home, in the bin.

12/21/14

From W.H. Auden’s The More Loving One:

“…

Were all stars to disappear or die,

I should learn to look at an empty sky

…”

W.B. Yeats: Never give all the heart

“Never give all the heart, for love

Will hardly seem worth thinking of

To passionate women if it seem

Certain, and they never dream

That it fades out from kiss to kiss;

For everything that’s lovely is

But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.

O never give the heart outright,

For they, for all smooth lips can say,

Have given their hearts up to the play.

And who could play it well enough

If deaf and dumb and blind with love?

He that made this knows all the cost,

For he gave all his heart and lost.”

A.E. Housman:

“He would not stay for me, and who can wonder?

He would not stay for me to stand and gaze.

I shook his hand, and tore my heart in sunder,

And went with half my life about my ways.”

12/21/2014

Oh have you lost and the losing is convulsive and violent and unrelenting and turbulent. The waves are sudden, nauseating, hateful.

12/23

“Anything I do in my life I can do because you love me.”

12/24

I fell in love with you today. As if sentence fragments were enough. And tomorrow, what is gone is also gone.

12/28/2014

“We could live in Hell together…”

12/29/2014

“Send him to me again.”

12/30/2014

35

Whatever fence it is...

... may I never be a story you tell.

“I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
Like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.”

-Pablo Neruda