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Intricate suspension.A square womb

ridged –ceramic teeth refract

my hands.80° amniotic fluid.

The ceiling is an eyeof glass, slashed

by a ladder that lists,forgotten, on the roof.

A century of turning.I seep into numbers into nameless

shapes intocreeping tongues that

flicker intothe suck of some

undreamt of event horizon.A sleight-of-hand

transubstantiation.

The pupil of the eye is the moon.The slow fade. The last of vision

is starstopped alignment.

Beets like bloody fists

It was wrong of me to consider you a person at all. You are, if anything, a solar flare, a dissolv-able planet beyond the blink of science’s eye, a tumbler full of hornets. Your move-ments in the kitchen repeatedly sever my bundles of nerves. I stay away; my re-straint becomes the hand that touches you. You are chop-ping vegetables at the kitchen sink. I want to slide in be-tween your hand and the cutting board, so your momen-tum might be the force that multiplies me into numbers. Then you promised you wouldn’t leave, I’d say, and I’d say, and me, and me.

Beets like silk livers

This is the light we have lost, a particu-lar shade of saffron like a baking cake. The thing about darkness is the way it spills your bound-aries outside the fix-ture of your shape, offering you new and difficult roads to navigate, but your si-lence has a darkness all of its own. Caved in on yourself you become negative space. If I pressed my mouth to the lip of you I would be som-ersaulted forward and inward and com-pressed into a new strange form. “I’m going out,” you say. I say, “You’re not.”

Beets like still hearts

I have seen you burn men down like good dry kindling. I have been the only one in the room with you and felt the weight of your past selves all breathing over my shoulder. Alone, I have counted your coy vices and found them manifold. To dissect the human heart is an act of sur-render, and I would surrender to you, dissipate into you, red as the red juice clasped now be-tween your hands. “What are you do-ing?” I ask, you mi-croscope, telescope, view with one eye closed. You say, “Cooking beets.”

1.1 Pear Pressure.

1.1 Stoned Fruit.

Even with the cello music, she could not bear to look at the photographs of polio vic-tims that were stickytaped onto the walls of her recovery room. The space was dark, artificially lit, the windows boarded over. It was thought by some that sunlight would hasten her transformation. She closed her eyes, ignoring the pump and grind of the ma-chine that encased her, strain-ing to divert all of her attention to the sound of the music that was drifting up from down-stairs. Downstairs, where the living were, the windows would be open onto the lawn, and there would be conversa-tion, the clack of teacups, bad-minton perhaps. Maybe she was imagining the badminton part. She couldn’t quite re-member what the thing [shut-tlecock?] looked like anyway. She opened her eyes, turn-ing them to the ceiling, her gaze instantly skittering away from the poster of a child with legs deformed into a bird’s. She concentrated on a cor-ner of the room, the crush of the machine filling her mind now, her lungs open-ing and closing. Like shells.

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