the time breath forgot itself

“If there is something to desire,
there will be something to regret.
If there is something to regret,
there will be something to recall.
If there is something to recall,
there was nothing to regret.
If there was nothing to regret,
there was nothing to desire.” 
……………………………………….Vera Pavlova.

Dear Rebel,

So much of this is about persistence. Did I tell you about the time I forgot how to breathe. I awoke on a Saturday and my chest was sore like April in mourning. I googled: steps to take when breath is forgotten. Videos and imagery emerged. Yoga poses. Lots and lots of kundalini. Some recipes for tinctures and toxin-reducers. Am I housing foreclosed energies that are tying up my lungs into suffocated pauses?

Name one thing I regret: letting that ring rust away from  my finger. Call out the first sounds I heard this morning: steam and persistence of cold. What happens when we recall: lost time. You called yourself pregnant and I told you about the time(s) I thought I was too. Last year, I miscarried my mind. This year, I may find myself giving birth to a mountain; how many stretchmarks will add themselves to my body from that push.

Rebel, in a room full of poets, I was reduced to a stereotype. In a room full of metaphors and freestyle’d verse, I was called dirty and abused. Sometimes we have no idea who sits beside us and the routes of survival.

I used to desire the wrap-a-round of somebody’s fingers into mine. I used to desire monogamy and breakfast. I used to regret my inability to close doors and keep them locked. Now I desire music and tuned colors. Now I regret not wearing sturdier boots.

Rebel, I still think about that yurt and the ways in which bodies can resemble this portable dwelling. We can airlift our bones anywhere. We can escape this cold and travel toward the moon or dig our way around it. I’ll bring the paper, percussion and manuals on how to breathe. I’m still gathering.

pack tiny stones in[to] precarious burst of my.

“take my right arm/where it was blown off/and set it in your sleeve”   –Meena Alexander

pass by the one wearing shoulders. threaten sleep by clinging eyes closed. i am curds, poached over rocky mountains. i am daniel, too distressed for a middle. i saw married and skinny. i ate october and not-quite 2am. if there is another, call me stone. place me near western waters in canada. even fingernails have a difficult time with closure: they keep extending until. mud casts a supporting role in this. and there is a walk-on cameo by analogous joints that used to bend inward. most of the time, these are poems. and so it is. some of the time, they are love letters to the ones I stutter against. there was that one time, it was a declaration of itch and bother. where is the carnage of your tongue after it windmilled beneath mine. just just just look past the mold and yellow lists spine’d on plastic shelf and remember that even in death, we are [all] just trying to catalogue the caskets build into our bodies.