It is difficult to identify a lack, hands fallen in folds of ocean, lips
water between hips, this ache opening windows, my unwashed
hair, the chewed ends of thumbs. But it is a skill to grow gaps,
lacustrine, my voice discovered through thinking in atmospheres
not scenes, through the history of a feeling.

Like a child’s dull color, like a mother’s shoulder blade, you
believe you are building an order you resemble. You believe you
are building an order you resemble to have a pair to resemble. You
feel folded all over and cut by scratched lines. You are building
small houses out of too-folded paper, whole villages of paper bent
hard to keep standing.

Inlay the spine, gather the fingers, find thread for the ear. Build a
body back to clarify: love is as much a choice as an impulse, a
metal chain down a pink torn throat, a lure unhooked, the days you
awake and it is not yet tomorrow. The house a feeling of a
shrinking enclosure. The sink spilling. The dishes climbing. I pick
my face to spit my skin I know there is fear I know my body, a
pocket unlined, a fold now because I could not fold then.

It is important to be able to make something beautiful, to shape it
into a form even when horrifically right. There is malevolence in
misarranging information, in intentionally throwing thoughts
into wells without listening for echo. We are built together so we break
together but we must build back together, too. If the light flickers, I
flicker, too.

And it was beautiful. The night began and years passed within the
forest. Coughs of trees and the blue snow light tapped the window.
Your shape for the window. The boys voyaged down streets. When
he arrived, I let him in. I let him slip me with his hands, knot my
hair into cheveux, redraw my half-opened face, move cycles of
winter through me like a train. The human formed, so belittled it
remained human, so keen in its tidy arrangement. He gathered my
skins into a skein, filled my mouth with swallows, let me feel like I
was falling into a long blue, flying unseen.