a press of summer

Dear Lidia,

Let’s call this a love letter. Let’s talk about how bodies smell differently in the summetime and that I keep calling myself a hippie but body hair and dreadlocks shouldn’t be enough to title myself beatnik bohemia. Shall we pour ocean into wine glasses and get drunk on the float of seaweed and litter’d lives thrown in? Can we roll poems into literate joints and fill each cylinder with shards of Kathy Acker? We can get high off the fumes of feminist monsterisms. What is marriage like. What is it like to sleep beside a man and to mother and to scratch out your sexuality into classrooms and west coast coffee shops? Do you long for soft? Do you desire the itch of inconsistency? Lidia, as you read this, I travel alongside my soul sister on a journey upstate. We head toward a land where the sky is not scraped by metal and 9-to-5’ers. We head toward a pond and exhaled kayaks and I am hoping to dig up some poems as I spend days camping closer to Autumn’s mist. I may be in love with a man; can you still call me queer? I haven’t written a new poem in over a week; call me poet still, yes? You swam miles toward something and I wonder if you ever reached it and what were its colors and can you paint it into my forearm. Let’s talk about the pop of pills hidden beneath tongues like muscular mouth tents. Let’s address the ways in which summertime can elicit more nudity than bedrooms can and I’ve been told my stare is misleading. Keep track of your daily intake of blinks, Lidia. Otherwise, someone may try to hide their genitals beneath your ribcage and apparently prophylactics are impersonal and numbing. How about we breaststroke toward a patch of earth where there are no men or mangled memories. Can you forward me Freud’s phone number? I’d like to be his next case study.

 

light(n)ing.

They can be dragged like a slur in the air. These mythical bugs of neon. Out of focus kisses of electricity. One night, she rummaged back against blades of grass, while Whitman watched and so did everyone else in this Brooklyn park. These clouds are jam-like, she said. Makes me hunger for knives and seeds. A summer is wrapped up in fumes of question marks and genetics ground up into foreplay. Some bodies are hairy, while others grow bulbs of light from abdomen. These insects are soft-bodied and brown and how many evenings until you learn the various shades of white that can occur on the other side of bones. Then, she speaks about a bloodied staircase and two bats swoop down and music rests inside padded coffin beside you but amidst all this lust, yellow, green, red waves of light.