I am seeing you in the broth again: the best days are rising to the top like good fats and clear onions. I almost bring down my tongue to taste, but I know it will only burn and take a week to heal, feeling numb like static when I count the backs of my teeth walking outside, brisk and alone this month, staying present but losing myself to sleep at night listing those things you might have given me— red stones, the number three, steering— and I feel like a tourist in my own strange city, leaning over a handrail and falling into the tigers to take a photo. I'll risk it to feel a rush of something, but I am not waiting for fruition unless it proves that time is a chord across a circle, or that the half-life of missing you is tonight's long dinner, where I lift the bowl again to my mouth and drink half, then half, then half, so as not to run it dry but instead to forget hunger. I don't always remember. Your house was full of those summer drafts.
Category Archives: Poetry
Self-portrait From Inside
I am more confident. I guess I decided two days ago when I woke up with the feeling that I was sweating sesame seeds. I heard a siren in the distance and did not think it unusual for this forested street. Before that, a family member gifted me seaweed body oil but I could not imagine putting on more oil. All of it, like the past months, wrings out of my bleach-sick hair and I would pluck it all out if I was not afraid. There is pencil lead living in my left thumb (which makes me a compass, or android, or rough draft) and in the back of my left eye there is something foreign. I couldn't tell you. I imagine an oddity caused by blue light and google "blue light glasses" or "am I sick with:" autofill. Do you ever check the time and look at everything but the time? No use lying unless it is down to sleep, of course it's all rain: how the words leave our mouths and cling to another, waiting for once to be drunk back hungry.
Dayward
Pulled my face down in the mirror and felt a shift. Pulled the cord to close the blinds harder, no blue wash on the floor tonight. The next room over feels ten degrees colder and the heat is past stolen, past steps. The walk down the hall is the slow take back of breath. The slow take of waking, like realizing you're sorry. It's the wrong time of year but it's all anatomy, your hair and your eyelids, buckwheat and hulls.
Five Course Meal
A spoon. Then a flashback to July because we grow berries here in-house and vertical. All year, jam and those gritty seeds in your teeth All the words babies can't say: cinnamon, lox, sashimi, brussels sprouts and butternut, a real aerobics of the tongue and breath, hors d'oeuvres, sous vide, leftovers, maybe. Here come the ferns and earthy things like garlic stems and perilla, but elevated to your vocabulary. It's foreign, sure, but we bring in fresh air from the seas. Something to make you feel full and alive, dairy or melons or sourdough. Thank the chef for this microdose of remorse, eating is pain and at once necessary. Have you heard of pâté. A bite of cake and we play you a song. You think of years past and how your hands and jaw worked together once, those days full of toil and excess. The piano closes.
44 Gardens
#1 is a bush by the sea and a seabird nesting within. Anything can be a garden. #2 is a topiary: my mother near tears after buying the wrong wooden planks for the vegetable box last summer. They aren't as tall as I thought, she says but pushes on, piercing bags of soil with her spade to overflow the box because she is too determined and that will be her downfall. #3 sits by the window with the most sun. We moved our fig tree inside once we noticed how the deer loved those fragrant leaves. And now the figs are finally coming in, but we miss the deer. #4 people call Oriental when they feel threatened by its perfect shapes and perfect control. This garden is a popular choice for photoshoots and old couples craving a bench. I'll admit to taking a photo near its magnificent red gate, wondering who built it and what they looked like. #5 is not picturesque, but it thrives. Grandma scavenged her garden together and secured it with chicken wire and zip ties. A sole pumpkin grows hanging: regal and perfect. #6 smells like death and our dog knows this too. On mornings when the grass is wet, I catch him digging up the compost because he is not afraid of me. I saw him once emerge with an unbroken eggshell between his jaw. #7 is a hackjob on the side of the road. The berries are too sweet and too polluted to eat. I recall that my grandparents sold berries roadside to survive. Once we made cobbler. #8 was beautiful and belonged to an old couple. I was called there as a Census worker and they did not speak English. I remember they were drying seaweed on boards in the driveway next to pots of huge beefsteak tomatoes. As I left, some of the seaweed was carried away by the wind and I didn't want them to think it was me. #9 I saw on a rooftop in the city and the first word that came to my mind was oasis. I felt bad but that was winter anyways. #10 was three boxes on a steep hill behind Grandma's old house. From the upper window, the reek of grandpa's cigarettes settled on purple beans, later to be mixed into rice, later to be eaten by Grandpa. The same fumes cycled back through his system until they wanted out. #11 happened because I wanted my own snap peas. The vines gripped the trellis like baby hands, so quickly. #12-#28 burned down in a fire, unseen on TV. #29-#44 are still lost in the smoke.
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