a love for life bubbling on the tip of my tongue like soda water, counterbalanced by tear-inducing apathy. evening air a thin, sticky film on my skin. night air like waxpaper.
(late summer’s fraying, those cicada cadences decaying and soothsaying.)
skeins of jazz music floating up to my apartment on saccharine and solitary weekend nights. and my palm curving around a tangerine sunset through a car window.
plaintively singing mitski in the parking garage, a voice drifting up lonesome and aerial, like a bat in the rafters of an empty church.
—
digging my thumbnail into old wounds until they exhaustedly, sluggishly bleed again. writing love letters to a summer that ended five years ago—craving dead summers even in the panting, muggy, sick heat.
performing burial rites for old relationships and then exhuming those empty carcasses again and again. a lone, desperate figure working night-shifts in some proverbial graveyard.
—
i don’t write about love—i shy away and recoil like some wounded creature, i circle around it, i leave it gaping, leave it a hollow cavern. not sure if my mouth can form the right shapes to articulate it, to whisper it into a still and night-drenched bedroom. to utter it low like an oath. to swallow it on a jagged sob. to swear to it on a sword’s edge and the promise of blood. to recant it, revoke it, spurn it, scorn it. to carefully negotiate it, like a blade to an artery. to level buildings with it, to echo ancient tragedies of it, to pledge scatterings of stars for it. to gasp it, then sigh, then say nothing at all.
to sing it, joyful and aloft, a hummingbird. to hold it clasped inside me, incandescent, a firefly light pulsing in a jar.
microcosmic 