There were poems I meant to write this week and sentences too afraid to call me back and so I folded them into a sock and put em in a drawer with the rest of the clean laundry.
Apartment I
As put away as it can be before you come over with your batteries and open lung. We are recording the river or the birds and will watch as we both guess the meaning of bulrush and if it’s as hard to pass through as the tongue makes it sound. We will watch for the sound, watch for the bird wings and ask if they’ve seen this in their ancestry before – to know something in their baths if they saw what it means to be stuck on land making our feet sick first.
I put the sweater back, bright green I fold it the way a bird folds a puddle. I can only trace your reflection in the water and pretend I am the water too. You have a bow with no need for arrows, you let them all loose. The four of them italicized in mud. Clean.
Apartment II
It’s taking everybody’s toothpicks to keep me standing. Tetherball on a plate, dinner plate next to the coffee and my cold feet up on the window, I’m sliding towards the city. Wished for a birthday further away – it is a surge of water my nose isn’t ready for in the summer with the hose and artificial rainbows and wet grass stuck to ankles and the old tear in my leg tugged taught as a bowstring you aren’t supposed to pull back without an arrow. I am a habit bad for its mechanism.
There is a day of the week with time in it somewhere, hidden inventory hidden treasure hidden day entirely fabled – a rider with a cloak and satin brown horse could come do these dishes and hunt for the nuts I buried last winter. You could come find the red paint and leather string and yellow yarn and tell me what to keep. If there was only someone as present as next week who could tell me what to keep.