SOME DEATH

The night was long and stillness transitory, coming between instances of the amorphous reaching and slow pulse of the moonlit tide. Splinter cells crept in the dead of night, working toward flanks. We listened even as we slept, felt with our flesh for invasion. And then it happened: a true interruption. Noise. Motion. The landscape shifted as they moved across the lands, hugging the contours of the hills and the valleys. Moments of panicked cacophony, moments of individual agony, moments of labored breath; and then a heavy calm as the entire engagement was finished. I remember it all well, but it's the smell that haunts me. And now I spend my morning breathing fallout as you head to work.

Empty space

I think this thing that I'm feeling is a long-felt pressure beginning to disappear, a weight beginning to lift and the sudden slackness leftover, as if nausea had disappeared and I were now weak with hunger, or if I stopped holding my breath and my lungs crumpled, or if I stopped bracing for it, let down my hunched shoulders, and let myself be rushed by the cold.

SOME TEXTS

for Brianna Maria

I.

She's one of the lights—there, across the river—that make the city glow. About now she shutters her windows, darkens the rooms one by one, and reminds herself of things to remember come morning, and tells her cat she loves her.

II.

This is a good morning note. This is a "my life is better for having met you" note. This is a I'm-having-trouble-falling-asleep-because-I'm-imagining-doing-fun-things-with-you note. This a #2blessed2stressed note. This is a note recreating the way you slow down my cardiovascular system. This is a note written with one hand under my pillow, a note written in the cold, a note that pulls its meter from my chest. This is a note meant to be read in a waltz: bri-an-na, ma-ri-a. This is a note meant to be read in the first few strands of light lain over our forested city while an unyielding young feline vies for your affections. This is a note that declares (in a manner of sustained volume and steady tenor unavailable to my own human voice) that when I think of you, the whole world seems a bit more handleable.

III.

I'll take payment in the form of hugs and kisses, and maybe sweet treats 0:) But also some money, right? We'll figure that out later

Long journey

Outside the window the views get stranger, the sky darker, and inside I grow bleaker, heavy with a grief as dramatic and inexplicable as the landscape, sitting next to a very sweet cholita with a very sour smell. This journey is longer than I thought.

STREP THROAT, WINTER: 2017

The athletic aesthete was a theist and an avid adventurer with an undying adherence to address adulations above.

Still time

Three days with the covers pulled up to my chin, ears and eyes stuffed full of garbage, shutting out the possibility of naming my fear or leaving anything behind, generating limbo, creating quicksand, sinking sinking, floundering, then climbing out and finding a different kind of pause in the plump black shiny bodies of a pair of aubergines on the kitchen counters smiling as they wait for the the warmth of the oven, and before that the sharp pleasure of the knife slicing, and before that the cool stream of water sliding off their waxy skin, and before that the gentle awestruck caress of my hands.

MORNING AFTER

Heading outside and feeling the cool air mix with the warm sun against your cheek, you pause a moment to hear the door close behind you before carrying on. The streetscapes are silent this early on a Saturday—the morning's frosted dew still unstomped on the grass blades. You reach into your pocket and turn up the music in your ears before you walk away from the major arteries and into the residential area. Backroad by backroad, you carve a lightning-shaped path across town. People are just waking in their homes, but cats and dogs and birds mark the otherwise still scenery with sudden movements and with lazy movements. Some trees survive green and needly in this weather, but many are glorified twigs, reaching upward sans fioriture. And then you take a turn down an alley and walk naturally through a backyard whose owner you've never met. And there it is, as it has been every time before: in a small clearing at the border of four homes—homes shaped like they house kind families—there lives a small collection of rosebushes. It's unclear who watches over this patch, but the care is immaculately and invisibly performed. You bend to the flowers in an observant deference to the improbability that something so fragile and so red should survive in weather where your own breath is too foreign to go unchanged. Standing, you feel the second half of a vibration in your pocket and excitedly pluck out your phone, but it's only a message from a friend and you go back to imagining today as a healing experience.