ON IDLE  

A strangeness touches my neck, and I am tasked with moving it.  

I grow my hands from medium to large and then large to nothing. 

What does it mean when dust is only half inside us? 

What can it mean to make a soft ruin of a stamina? 

Lately, I have been feeling otherwise frequent.  

My list of to dos getting close to a kind of life.  

I visit the town’s library with a piece of mail to prove I am planar. 

That is, I am no longer delicious and sleeping.  

Underneath the August warmth exists a kind of world order. 

I float my palms open like a lotus and am born in an ear. 

I lift my exoskeleton and think: enough.  

I have been growing a practice of continuing genuflection.  

In linen pants I buy off Amazon, I study pink clapboards and outsized palms.  

I watch the trees’ nested shadows, how they split the sun.  

On Whitehead, a home framed in sea-green balloons, fluorescent pink flamingos.  

On Duval, a sickly man who sells cigars on the sidewalk and a sky that comes at me in sections.  

It feels good to imagine a room and that room being painted in yellow.  

It feels good to be reduced to a body.

INSTANCE RUBBING

I know I am fortunate  

To be a body practicing  

A body  

Know morning  

How it is incongruous  

In light  

Rain  

This writing is  

About permanence  

Maybe  

Maybe dissolution  

On our street  

A man and a woman and a memory 

Smelling of coconut sugar  

Patchouli oil  

Sea  

It is almost impossible to believe 

There is a connection in such 

Momentary perfume  

It is almost impossible to believe 

I’d hate to spend another summer 

Breathing  

Under the palms  

On the curb 

A bottle of beer  

Like a lukewarm heart  

The aroma of urine  

And orange peel about  

A fence  

I inhale the best part  

And have a distant feeling regarding 

Not wanting  

To talk to God  

Remembering a tube  

Fondly slipping  

A piece of the outside world inside 

My vein  

There is a story here I’ve written  

Too many times  

On my worst days  

I feel a man  

Cut below my stomach  

With immaculate steel  

Want to crouch down and  

Soak my exquisite fingers in  

The earth’s  

Disintegrating soot  

On better days  

I swan arms like the cutaway walls they are 

Exhale finely into these totaled ribs 

Life has been kind  

Of a let down  

Of archival bone  

Me desperately  

Wanting to leave this simulation 

Beautiful  

And sad  

I’ve come close but failed  

To be the woman  

With an accompanist  

Feeding stray cats  

See this  

Rotten elegy to the night  

My constant  

Drafting  

Of a looser train of rooms  

Where am I even now  

There is so little space  

In my singular myth  

I buy a cortadito  

In a paper cup  

Walk myself to the ocean  

To watch its lights alternate 

Green 

Then red  

Forgetting the disordered heart moving 

Around in my chest  

On Royal St.  

Birds and feather  

Intersect  

Wire  

A door swinging out  

Into a full  

Bleed of grass  

Above  

The blue-trazodone sky  

Emptying into a blue wound  

Like how this poem is  

Being made  

Under the score of my hands  

Under the score of my hands  

My uterus  

Peeling back like an egg