Slippery Art

 
the melt

Never mind the distances traveled, the companion

she made of herself. The threadbare twenties not

to be underestimated. A wild depression that ripped

from January into April. And still she sprouts an appetite.

Insisting on edges and cores, when there were none.

Relationships annealed through shared ambivalences.

Pages that steadied her. Books that prowled her

until the hard daybreak, and for months after.

Separating new vows from the old, like laundry whites.

Small losses jammed together so as to gather mass.

Stored generations of filtered quietude.

And some stubbornness. Tangles along the way

the comb-teeth of the mind had to bite through, but for what.

She had trained herself to look for answers at eye level,

but they were lower, they were changing all the time

-Ongoing, Jenny Xie

-To the boy & beans in apt. 1B-

after Jenny Xie,  zuihitsu- 

sunday rolls around & i’m wondering how to write a zuihitsu.

someone told me that zuihitsu can be anything. even a shopping list can pass, but shonagon fills hers with delights: soft frost on grass blades at winter’s dawn, the yawn of a cat or small child. 

suffering hardly makes a dent in her pages devoid of grief — death as an extravagant display of devout melancholy.

these days evenness & boredom arrive at my door unprompted. extravagant displays left to musings on the past or cheeky future, it plays tag.

summer dreams of scheming and tea bags left on someone else’s table is delightful to think of… i’d never thought i’d miss new york’s street steam slapping me in the face. 

the inconvenience of it all really gets to me, the steam slap was always en route to something more important… now said slap would be the highlight of my day.

let this offering of thoughts serve as a zuihitsu, am i doing this right?

my back aches from hunching over a blue light eminence all day. today i thought of a strawberry & that was certainly delightful. 

long interludes of learning about glutamate’s transporter protein at the synapse sends my head into a spin. i am a reluctant neuroscience participant… i still don’t know what my body needs.

i am, a rather efficient zipline in which penpals make the most of the ink. i am a game of skeeball in which one player throws lots of balls at once. that's basically the synapse. 

boiled water that isn’t forgotten and left to grow cold but used to make fresh tea is delightful. a strawberry container discarded is less so. 

even though they’re only temporarily ours, ronnie & rin fill me with delight. when hungry, insistent meows turn into hushed crunches of eating, it is the best sound. 

nights are numbed melancholy of being all right with doing the same thing. if i could, i’d punch routine in the face. there aren’t enough recipes that can make you truly forget where you are. 

i can pretend i’m not human by considering being a fig wasp in a fig. sweetness is there all around me. i sneak a taste & wait to magnificently grow.

when i was in a fig as a fig wasp, everything was zuihitsu and everything was delightful. 

fig trees & their wasps-

i’ve been thinking of

fig trees & their wasps 

& how every fig

once held a wasp chick

is my jam filled with

insect essence, rife

with adolescence?

& tree - pollen dense. 

...

above: my eyes growing tired, this is how the liquid spills from them sometimes

bemusement

worried about the cracks in my hands, scared of what will come out. 

on winter— alcohol in the palms & the oven left on / 

cold hands caught in 

botox’s place, paralyzed / 

sinking synapses froze.

when acid rain chills it then turns to acid snow. 

when my hands crack open more there is nothing but a plastic gel. i am oozing, dripping my way down the stairs where the snow melt mixes with a car’s exhaust. i am tired too, but i don’t mix with the melt. i don’t want to end up a fish drink. 

salt stray, from the ocean to the mouths & streets. back again. next time your stew is filled with street salt, my hand ooze drying on the beach. 

a frozen wasp buried deep in snow, its chemicals contained. is it better in a preserved state?  

when spring comes, hands commence closing / but the wasp empties out. 

my preference, i don’t know, i doubt.

...

figs do not always contain a wasp inside. sometimes it is the whisper of a wasp, because the enzymes of the fig break the body down.

musings is a good bowtie for dressing up the word “thoughts”. i muse on why winter has grown on me, and conclude with the fact that i am kinder to myself now.

taste is the ghost of smell & the enlightenment of sight. protons birth sourness, acidity. 

above: winter tells me to shut up because she's almost done. she tells me the story of lake placid, & how it was so cold that it knocked the breath out of my lungs. she finishes with how i didn’t care because i was running into paradise, & to die there was preferred. 

winter dryness

I.

chewing layers off.

little circles, odd,

come off my lips. dark 

ovals remain, stark 

difference in shade

between valleys lain

& the stiff peaks (of)

the periphery.

II.

sudden flares of the

skin catch me — aware

patchy streaks of heat

on an ankle, reap

lashings unsterile

by nails sharp, feral

reptilian heat

firing up 1B 

dryness, lingerer.

or spiders? under

III.

lavender grin, soap

got into your mouth.

washing dumb with paste

pause, sense the tastant,

mint & wet swirls still.

remember the fill

of bitter & acid

on the wake? amidst

worst part of the day

morning dry / mouth stay

...

above: sisters. the feeling of sameness is relative.

berlin & the myth of the forest-for three poets

—plague land— i’ve had no news of you >

germany in my head is always darkening / the sun never makes it to the cusp. 

just municipal-air & gas lamps, dampening the balcony / pigeon nest at dusk.

in germany, your kitchen plates & spoons & bowls get all mixed /

up, & the chicks, freshly hatched / peep but never ask for much.

like wei / all that’s close to me is a brook. i don’t have a nest. /

the birds fly north like someone spitting.

once in awhile on the sprain brook they sing *

i look at myself, i have no shampoo left /

just watery soap. i am preening like the birds do.

i look at myself, i have no long range plans

to go back to the forest is all i know #

the myth of the wild german forest fills me / tell me,

i’ve heard nothing of zz & his kitty liver woes 

when he is a ghost i know he will — mew — linger / he will

weep in the wet gray sky & haunt the ear <

tell me how you stay up half the night & never see the day.

in my mind, you walk among berlin’s streets & also a coyote.

pines pop up everywhere, you are in the gloom wood. you are /

clean, always, while the sun goes down-down-down.

dusk came unnoticed over the emerald hills

& autumn clouds layered the darkening sky %

the myth of your nights capture me, i-i-i write a letter.

imagine carrier pigeons bring it by /

you'll hear the pigeons call in the moonlight

sad that the page is bare at night ^

* tweaked from birdsong brook, wang wei via seth vikram

# from in answer to vice-magistrate zhang, wang wei via seth vikram

% from listening to a monk from shu playing the lute, li bai via seth vikram

^ tweaked from the road to shu is hard, li bai via seth vikram

> from dreaming of li bai, du fu via seth vikram

< from ballad of army carts, du fu via seth vikram

...

torpor

in the morning i am a squirrel with their tail tucked tight /

tell me how to wake without warmth.

holed-up, tree-tment languid & slush.

& coffee — brewed badly without rush.

all day / i am in an oak, over, hunched.

adenosine chittering in my sentences. 

terrible — eyes falling before night does.

unhungry with the desk lamp left on bright.  

...

visibility is cracking the window in the shower to watch the steam rise outside: hot & vaporous mingling with the dry & devoid

dust bowl

tea sweat drops

lingering mint in a mug

i wonder what it is 

to be leftover.

listening to languid tones 

about grounded pieces of 

drought / dust doc

the bowl full of clogged 

noses & mouths

i don’t have a right to complain about my dryness.

at not dusk, but dawn, 

the sky / a blood red, interviewee says.

i paint my nails with

a foreboding sunrise.

i sip my mint grown 

farther than my sister. 

it feels colder /

it tastes bitter. 

...

tent for ronnie

tent for ronnie made of knees and sheets.

ronnie box, ronnie bag, 

ronaldinho in the blue sexy bag.

ronnie fort with ronnie flag. 

…

...

that chemical tastant

h. d. told us to embrace living in a toxic world. break down the sordid barriers, entropy will

envelop all of us in time. i don’t know how to reconcile piles of my maintenance as waste in 

another’s home, i’m sorry to the wrasse, you are now living in a toxic world — 

did you taste some of my shampoo yesterday, did it turn your mouth purple? i know it didn’t clean it out. 

she told us to accept the respective time for the secular to break down; 

hours, months, days 

some things vanish in an instant, other things stay. but there aren’t enough bugs & sea slugs for plastic to turn to palatable waste. 

toxic angler in the mariana trench, an island that floats away / only to expand in their throats. 

we’re used to formaldehyde, foreign & plastic face masks at a funeral, goodbye forever wrapped in a polymer sheet. 

(on inheritance— inventions of things that bend without break, continue to fall into synthetic laps. how unfair is that?)

entropy, in a large scheme, 

is reassuring. my body will become a fig, that fig will become a cheating wasp. all that is lost will become the dust to which something else is made. even dust in the air is something, it’s enough. 

...

the melt

palmer nights

when the sun sets your eyes like photosynthesis. 

greening & sugar darlin’

dusk custom of curling, made a half moon 

on the couch.

— you close up tight like a dandelion / at night

chamomile sea, ocean of calming tea

lukewarm cup cradle rocking laxly on the table.

pale burn tiger balm, capsaicin snores. i encore

on genshin levels while your head rests the same.

tell me how many petals does a spring tree make? 

last night i had a dream they all blew onto 

the bed. woke to a 

soft april shower in my head. 

for you, pouring contact fluid in different kinds of half moons. 

it fills me up like the case does / when you stir awake with a smile.

hungerin

rin-ging from the bathroom: it’s rin

rin-ging at dawn.

my kitten sings long past the ring 

of the alarm.

...

spring

now that spring is here i still feel liquid bubble up in my throat /

& here i thought winter was the problem.

cryo’s gaseous state to meet the sky, unfrozen & freed from 

the ground, resounding heat in the gods’ eyes, hands, ears. 

it is too much. i don’t like springing anymore. 

my apartment is turning into a swampland, again.

here i am, studying the brain of a mouse filled with cysts, drawing him close to feline death. 

toxic parasite on the screen of a / desk that is falling into saline & peat.

i repeat, maybe if i were a fig wasp in a fig things would be more conscionable.

i think // about grasslands, about pollen & the wafting heat from the pizza place below

long ago, a squirrel found a chestnut & buried it deep. 

do you think it lasted the winter?

i pick plastic out of my spring leek soup.

somewhere, methane is rising from permafrost, a ghost.

it stays low & haunts the breath,

i lick a floral stamp & also take out a pen.

…