Slow pains sparkle like tin pans most nights
Most nights when we sleep on our sides and our wrists
Yours; mine; I cannot tell without more pause but
All the same they are inescapable yet effervescent.

[If Faulkner uses abject one more time I will...]

There are troubles with this tongue and this teeth
And I cannot express them now but in time
In time, all the mistakes will be crossed out.

Everything is done
All that I have tried to say
Voiced, unvoiced, crumples.
This place, inconsequential
Hangs above me by a thread.

With nothing to do
I went exploring.
The James house is stately, old- I think of it
when I read Walcott.
Disjecta membra.

There is nothing so sinister
as Mr. Tumnus behind any of its doors
(what is literature for if not allusions?),
but there are enough doors
to keep a stranger busy for hours.
Days, even.

And that is what I had been doing during my midyear cool mornings and stifling afternoons.

I once knew a girl her
Name was Liez she did not
Have hair fingernails cartilage
She had the nicest smile.
When Liez smiled it was as rare as
Feeling the last raindrop of a storm
Remembering the last time your father
Hoisted you up to sit on his shoulders the
Last time you could sit with your legs Indian-style
With your feet on top.
When Liez died no one made a sound but they
All cried and I did too.

For sale:
One complete pulmonary system
Heart, only good for parts.
Bloodless, lifeless, scarred on the left side
Email with bids and for photographs.

Coming home to find that you had changed all the hinges
Was worse than losing a limb.
For six years, the sound of your door creaking
Open at three AM signaled me to
Pretend to be asleep, to hang up the phone or
Close the book and squeeze my eyes shut.
I knew if my sister left her room, I knew
When my mother was cooking dinner.
Now the silence is a personal affront, the opposite of ma,
this is the terrible discomfort of not knowing who is coming or going.

When my sister was away, hearing her
Door squeak open on occasion made me
Feel as though she still resided here
Her ties have finally been severed, and she
Hasn’t even finished undergrad yet. This is akin
To replacing all of our larynxes with computers.

When we open our mouths, pale blue text
Boxes with rounded edges and sans-serif phrases
Float out and hover noiselessly.

I have said “I forgive you” 490 times.
You asked me if I knew I was a dumb ****. One.
You told me it was my fault he left. Seven.
The numbers are lost on me after that
But they follow, illogically, a logical progression
Like the patterns formed by the spaces in-between
Words, trickling down past what is happening.
The plot is unknown, at times even random,
but the spaces are most certainly predetermined.
At 490, the count resets to zero.