ten year old boys sitting sideways & restless on the cafe chairs,
untwisting cinnamon rolls into the snail shell laze
of march break afternoons.

the sweep of the airplane is just like
the trace of your finger against sky.

music: 5 years time, noah & the whale
mood: proclivity for productivity

there's something about six o'clock and the way contours hang deep from the saw-toothed parts of our houses. sunlight across powerlines & the dry salt tumbling & staining old lanes of traffic. i will never be anywhere as pointed as a rooftop shadow.

i spent yesterday afternoon with m. at the slip of ocean i like the best. we sat with our legs crossed & ate synthetic things, filling ourselves with round & cheerful colours. when i listened, i could hear the dull gurgle of the tide, a sound that echoes in the makeshift streams of snow-melt. with toes flat against the edge of water, we look up into the sheltering boards so we can dream better about remember whens. is that supposed to be a tulip? he asks. it looks more like a half-eaten, plum-coloured pear

& i thought
we were going to look right through and see the sky.

it is spring today & i caught the very first crocuses! a year a thousand years ago, they were ancient & wise, ossified by winter. these are such wonderful, straightforwardly flowers.

sound: we're a whistling orchestra
song: in the flowers, animal collective

uni is the last unknown piece of sushi. it reminds me of ocean liniment, mustard-yellow & cold, made from the invertebrate spines of very deep. (rawness & warm rice between chopstick-fingers finally becoming a ritual.) i talk about this under harvest moons of early morning: how the peripheries of a creature melted through my teeth and i could not taste the edges.

music: hospice, the antlers
mood: leeks

i was watching the baby when it started to happen.

her hair stood up like filaments, straight in the web of sunlight so she looked weightless & irresilient as a creature from far away. her palms were flushed pink and she cupped a handful of moist goldfish that flew to the floor when she choked, airless. everyone turned. we were outside the hospital, and the bus driver kicked his foot on the brakes. walked back through the seats, stepping on the crackers so that they turned to dust. she's alright, alright, alright but this look i've only seen this look on the crowd's face once before, when we pulled into the train station & i was only seven.

later, i walked home but ended up somewhere else.

*

fact: when they wired the houses in los alamos
they used 15,000 tons of borrowed silver bouillon.

*

my sweet friend & i dream about living this summer as if it were without relent. we will fill the sea with hurricane tents, and hang bouquets of cameras from the doorknobs of our bedrooms. like this. or, the sound of the stories that we tell. soon, i will be serving coffee in the victorian house across from the gardens, and teaching myself how to draw peonies from the hiss of steamed milk. we will capture everything. i will wish for a rowboat the colour of maples.

*

dearest, you inhabit places as a landscape.