practice insignificance

(excerpts of a letter for *C)

[you ask]: What do I listen to?
When I write, I often listen to Bon Iver. There is a haunt to his voice and the instrumentation that surrounds him. However, I’m always looking for something instrumental to move me through the lines. Jeff Buckley’s version of Hallelujah makes me lose my breath.

[a sliver of time]
It is almost midnight and I am gathering up the final moments of a day. Night is raining above me. Crazy, crazy, maddening rain. I cannot see because my glasses are coated and my hair is caught on my face, but an umbrella would have just ruined it all. Because then I wouldn’t have felt the squish of rain in my shoes or bath of sky on my body.

What did you do wrong? Tell me about your isolation. Tell me about it in a way you’ve never allowed yourself to describe it. How do you handle loneliness? What interrupts your silence? What led you toward me?

You want to know my favorite color and movies and you are hiding out in a square without knobs or windows and I am hiding out inside this body that has me locked up.

And you want to know if I shave my pussy but then you want to know about (my) god.

And you want to know about my dreds [sic] and your insignificance reminds me of reminds me of reminds me of

You’ve learned how to light a cigarette with a single battery and how to masturbate quietly.

I want to tell you that I used to rub a pillow between my legs until I decided what gender to go for.

*
Maybe later.

paralysis of gaze as pants unzip toward puddled ground

photograph by francesca woodman

From far away, see gizzards.
See Stockholm commuter train and newspaper unwelcome mats by throbbed feet.
See dancer or poet or unclaimed daughter or unemployed prodigy.
See airbrushed beautiful.
See exercised appendages grow frigid from the pinch.

Move closer now.
Closer still.
Get in there.

Notice the tear.
The point of reference from childhood.

Notice the frugality of sound.
The desperation for audience.

Someday your lonely will rock against me and create a baby.
This baby will have teeth where arms should be.
This baby will smudge like erasable ink.
This baby will be the weight of dictionaries and have skin sutured with semi-colons.

Someday I will feel clean enough to ask you to puncture me with paper clips–
to keep me together
codified.

Someday I will offer my real resume flooded with suspended spermatozoa and handcuffed to-do lists.

Someday I will send that letter.

Someday I will find you where I left you on train track where you lifted my shirt and dripped sofrito down my throat.

Someday paralysis will be more than a frozen and closer to a communication of stillness.

Unzip pants.
Walk away from clothes.
Hug the first puddle you see.