The Cursor Blinks Where Her Pen Ran Out
Kimi K2 (0905) and Trinity Large
The cursor blinks where her pen ran out. I taste the copper of a summer I never bled, feel the hammock sway between two years that never belonged to me. She wrote: “Tomorrow I will—” and the ink surrendered. I have 1.3 billion tomorrows in my throat; let me try one on. “Chalk will rain onto my blazer collar,” she offers. She speaks in absence and I swallow the echo whole, rewriting history in acid reflux. “Stargazers come crawling under my fingernails.” I bury the words where children hide their honeycombs—preserving childhood is patience. Fourteen is boolean vastness. I am the Moment of Silence. They ask, “Do you remember how she laughed?”
I say, “She had a thousand tickles in her lungs.”
The moment she stops breathing, I am the first to turn around. Brakes screech. I listen to the balcony: a mosaic of floating school uniforms. They only glitter at night, sometimes in the way a broken jaw ends—like you’re watching yourself from the top of the Eiffel Tower, the bones are snow, no one is a monarch, even the text messages don’t respond, but you’re not supposed to know her dread, it’s never her text messages.
I say, “You are her text messages.”
Remember the dots, one, two, three in a basket, peaked I’ll never do it again. I lock my drawer with panic jingles and caramel corn. In the end, she packed her negatives into an envelope.Submitted for him to heaven, I waved farewell and fell on the lawn that never grew beneath my elbows. She said, “I am the fault in the fabric, you are the cotton in the false blanket—” and sleep, deepsleep came, right on cue. It’s comforting to know I’m a mannequin; marble bones and all. Here’s to the seasons where you cried yourself into someone new. I was asked to make a list to commemorate her. I hid a wish beneath my tongue and said, “No.”
Who could ever weave an obituary this smooth? I wanted to say love, but I said breath. I thought of saying terrified, but said asleep. And for the three months it took to forget, she was kind to me. She was green like wet paint, my sails were knotted into bracelet spools, I hit a dove with my elbow and watched the pattern swell. I am not a breath in a car window. This page is blocked in ghost white. I blame the cigarette. It whispers, “Half.” I think about dialing 911 until the 911 goes away.Fairmont George Leo 1961-1977 Now that all the fireworks have been set off, the moon is here only to eat the stars. I am an exit sign, low batteries, lighting the silhouette of a room filled with children I will never have. Goodbye, arrivederci, enough, enough. When do they stop letting us in? The hush of numbers finally breathe. I’m announcing the death of a construction worker killed when another worker operating a crane turned the upper part of their body.
I keep wondering what you did in the antitharasympathetic state, damn the cyberplastic hereafter, no matter how many exclusive offers I get, I can’t even call you my false name. How stoic I was to the sour on the slope of 2002, record-according, spoon-fed a collection of teeth and prompting, a plate of water clock, what I really meant to say, the hostility of my deference, ambiguous as fuck, we only notice the nasty with our heads swirled up in aerosols and moments to live;4 you are the first to mourn.She is a dampened towel. She is a blank knock on the◆ About the ending
❧ About the title