A gift
An implicit regret of his of stopping his search for something to someday love. It is neither the seven mountains, nor the precariousness of the alien’s stance over the ledge
nor the waning crescent moon, nor the bursting red heart, nor the cheesy, faux prophetic verses (though they get me sometimes) that grabs my attention most. Instead, I find myself gravitating to the alien’s eye. How it narrows down to a point at the back of his skull. How his eye takes up almost his whole face. It is an eye that sees fully, that needs to take up that much room because if it were any smaller it would miss the beauty of the beyond, in all its cosmic minimalism.
I Bounce in Delirium
the parmesan Man sat with us
so did the sage who emphasized words creepily
and the self-conscious 8th grader with sunburnt eyelids
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the naked crab-walker was a few feet down
talking to the yurt people about how to tap a yak for meat like maple trees
someone yelled "I'm not going up there unless there's a corndog."
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then the monkey mutant strolled through
and the high as a kite Wendy's employee
peso wore his co-op onesie
and pancakes drooped from the sky
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we laughed in spirals
crossing fingers and blinking hard
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they floated off the cliff one by one till there was nothing but the wind and the sound of stars
The fire would hug her, if only her bones weren’t steel
Next to the stockings is where I feed her small kisses of soup. One forearm tap means more, two taps mean stop, three taps mean too hot.
We don’t eat Hungarian candies anymore. The chicken always turns out dry. Each recipe is a ransom note, demanding her memory from my mouth. At least Campbells goes down the same as homemade now.
You’d think she got stage fright, the amount she stutters. It makes me talk more; as much as I should’ve long ago. She always asked me: who provides the hankie for the weeping trees.
We stare at the frozen trees for hours. When snowflakes fall, she squeezes my hand, her eyes smile. Sometimes I want to rip the vocal cords from her throat and patch them up with her thimble and thread. Sometimes I want to rip her hand apart. How do the trees feel when the Northern wind blows through and freezes their tears and asks them to drown in place?