Hawaii

Dear Water Warm in My Thorax, Dear Throatscreen Huddled Against All Foreign Wind, Dear Martian, Dear Many Hundreds of Future Memories of Future Pasts, Dear Univexor, Dear Salt You Can See,

Funny you should talk about sunburns. See reverse.

[Postcard photograph of your damp green bathing suit, the one with red hard- candy ribbons running through it, the one left behind in haste, goes here.]

A semi-private-feeling symbol for a semi-private form of communication about semi-private things.

Funny, about sunburns. Everything is brighter today. Cement is brighter today.

[Onscreen: cement oozing up out of the sidewalk. Jump cut to the cement façade of the hotel where we first met.]

Funny, something close by is pulling ambient images from this mind I used to call my own. I feel blank and spoken-to.

[Close-up shot of a darkroom: beaded Photo-Flo solution races down the edges of a wet print. Overhead perspective: silver ripples in a red bathtub. Both pictures, glued together by the state of Hawaii, go here.]

Shared grey wooden floorboards. Half-full cups. Days without details. You’re right: more and more, the past is becoming color-drunk rain spun from future-perfect iron clouds. Try tomorrow at 175% magnification.

 

The Longer I Stay Here

Dear Exorbital Fangirl, Dear Double-Bind Blind, Dear Open-Label Test of Faith, Dear Birdsmouth, Dear Similar Notch in Other Components, Dear Boy in the Back Room, Dear Halogen Swimming Pool, Dear Constant, Dear Constant, Dear Painless Aura, Dear Metallurgist, Dear Ampersand- Monologue,

Paint me where the tan on your hips used to be. Attach me to the motion-lines in the last panel. I want the last trace of your disappearance to be the thing that puts me in quotation marks.

Instead of you, I’m left with miniature plasma-reactor hums coming from the bedroom. Do I remember the moment I forgot who I was? Do you? Miniature quantum tectonic events pass between us like sharpened butterfly murmurations.

There’s an ultraviolet crease in the cassette tape spewing from my mouth: the longer I remain in this place, the more my story becomes yours.

Like us or soap or a boat or a season these notebooks have minds of their own. Someone’s strange urgent cursive has been carved into the first page of this one. It says: The people you love become trade routes tattooed across your body, and tearing yourself up is how you keep them alive.

 

Sculpture Composed of Time Machine and Various Red Things

Dear Crazy Avenue, Dear Informatrix, Dear Crusader’s Chocolate, Dear Steam Engine, Dear Sex on Easter, Dear Corner of My Event Horizon, Dear Cinnabar, Dear Entire Alphabet —

I built heavy triangular meditation modules in the megabrambles to remind me that the people I meet (that I meet without you to ground me) are more than just my inner experience of this place given form.

I read your journals: every color matches every color. I hammered you into my own work:

Two figures sit on an embankment overlooking a petrified week. One points at its steepest slope while whispering into the other other’s ear. Time is in fact a spectral band where greys contend with golds and blues, where residual hums force your name into my mouth, the way nervous girls treat a pocket designed to hold all things secret. See reverse.