Walls undulate in a room shrouded by clouds.
My desires first arrive to me in my dreams,
like a moon in partial view,
like my joys, so delicate and hard-won,
like the time I conjured a doppelganger
of the first “the” in a typoed text.
Girls, Californian or not, speak in
simile so naturally,
speak through multiverse of split ends,
silkened by spiders,
and we are, like, so many other things,
such as, ourselves.
after Ana Mendieta’s “Siluetas” and
a sign in Bryant Park that said, “the grass is resting”
the field’s grace, etched on my arms,
cushioned, by a half-woven coat,
tickled, when i turn over.
crows quench their thirst,
dropping, in drought,
the last of their stones.
we are porous and dewy faced,
the boats and the seas.
kites catch the wind in our sails,
our bodies of water in shared rest.
by an interstitial shore,
sprouts grow in my graveled shadow.
the grass lays down
at bryant park, silk boundaries
only swayed in breeze.
not redemption, but remembrance: in
this dream, anger is no debt, unowed
a body in venting, nor is it two pigeons,
wings parallel in the same wind.
but maybe, a future for my
childhood: granted by
lesson plans i could never follow,
how i was allowed to hug you,
the assignments we
made to complete together.
transcendance trails immanence:
i’m cherishing, on a good day,
in a good dream, my
futility, the futurity of it.
i strayed so far to feel
unbelievably myself,
and considered
my parents poets,
our circuitous inheritance: