The careful moon maunders through the glass ceiling
on these long nights

when I try to alchemize my visions into ships.
I imagine the mist moping among the larches—

the dewy bark that wakes,
looking for shadows of loggers in the grey.

On cold nights like this I sleep beneath a sheet, sweating,
dreaming of China’s violet sky exploding with hues

of a butterfly’s paper wings.
The summer air crackles above the pale girl’s tent—

a counterfeit ankh hangs between
her naked, sagging *******—

and she sees the future in the reflection of her eye
on an Opinel’s blade—her iris wheezing into shapes.

She tells me there are gales ahead
like ones in schoolbook etchings of Poseidon.

Boys will choke on salt, she says,
or the ice will kiss the little princes to sleep.

But she coos how they look like dancers at a ball.
How many boys will be lost? I ask the girl.

All of them, she says with ***** on her breath,
but this won’t stop you, will it?

In my favorite dream yolk sizzles on a cast iron as mother sings.
My older sister laughs, cheeks full of sourdough and jam,

and father’s wet hair drips onto his paper—
the ink of little letters smearing into bare branches.

The dream helps me forget that rain never ends where I wake,
where guilt’s proboscis feeds on hardened veins.

To whomever’s my son, please don’t put me in an elegy
where the memory of me will rot like wet wood.

Before the clear day
I forgot the sky was blue
and stubborn,
refusing to be anything but blue.
Trees are afraid to fly,
not because they might fall to the ground, mind you,
but up into the sky.
To them
the blue veils the horror,
the strums of starlight,
where nostalgia is a padded room.
My uncle was like a tree,
and my mother hated him for it.
A stranger once started a conversation by saying,
“That’s the thing about trees.”
And I felt like I’d met him,
but rather than worry I just looked up.

Under white bulbs
Dr. Black studies me through the glass.
I will be figure A on page three,
and how I purchase jazz CDs will be section II,
which will have footnotes
on 21st century Latinos in White suburbia,
the economic decisions of lost boys,
references to Dr. Earnst’s
Entitlements of the Capuchin,
and droll digressions on such and such and such—
dear Erwin musing on the thirteen times
we happened upon each other in life,
the most embarrassing being when I wore a pig mask
to what I thought was a masquerade
but which ended up being my own funeral.
One day we’ll vaguely recall the white sky on the morning
we met through an imaginary friend,
a girl who we forgot to name.
Does it matter, if it never really happened?
I just remember when you were a child
you looked through the glass for me,
and when I wasn’t there you waited through the night.

Before bed I poured my joy into a jar on the stand,
and when it was full
flecks of light glided around our bodies.
Her ears sang a lo-fi lullaby
as her eyelids caught each fleeting note.
When you look away from me
what are you trying to hide?
Our wild skin cooled on cotton
as our minds dipped
into fragments of what pains us.
Get close to me.
During the moment I was sad because
I imagined myself as an old man
forgetting most of it.
We didn’t invent a new thing,
just a simple thing so simple it was beautiful.
And when you finally spoke
only the sensation of touch was left of me.