your cheeks rough
from          the                  cold when i brushed them
snow on Monday afternoons, and our numb fingers trying to
feel each other.

we went to the supermarket,
took our cameras to photograph
homogenized colors like the milk
in between poses, we played catch with the packets of fish *****,
drew smiles on the condensation in the freezer aisle
chased around the boy (code name platypus) with the Rolex.
so we balanced:
primary-colored bell peppers –
on our heads
and waited for the flash.

Waiting for the subway and talking on the phone with her, he asked: pepperoni or cheese? You choose. “Pepperoni would be good,” she said and he hung up. The 7 train arrived, blowing back his hair. The doors opened with a dull beep and he stepped through into the air conditioning.

He sat down in the plastic orange seat, putting his backpack on the floor in between his calves. When he stopped by at their favorite, Franco’s, “Pepperoni or cheese? You choose.” Pe – Cheese would be good, he found himself saying. In a strange act of deviousness, he decided it would be a brilliant joke.

At home, she was disappointed when she saw and went to heat up spinach leftovers. As she opened the microwave door and put in the white ceramic bowl, a great sadness came over him, and he only managed to swallow down a few bites before dropping the profane slice back onto his plate.

You,
fall through my fingers like rain.
mixed with the residue of some delusional things that we can’t help but
feel.
because inside we’re just children, really excited about going to the
movies downtown (on cheap Tuesday!), 7-dollar tickets clutched in our fingers,
like your fingers clutched in mine.
I lean against you, you lean against me, and it’s just the way that we lean,
the angles are complementary. or was it supplementary?
I don’t think this is love.
but it sure feels like Splenda instead of real sugar.

he only sees the beauty in things he already knows. although I’ve never heard him say that word. he gets Pink Floyd and he gets Bruch, but he read the first 2 pages of Gone With the Wind when I put it in his hands one day, and told me it was crap.
I swear he only feels nostalgia when it’s familiar and I swear he can’t wrap his brain around what lovely harshed pale things are.
he’s very judgmental, and he’s curly-haired and he smells like whatever the opposite-of-miserable is,
and he’s got something that’ll make your eyes twitch. It’ll make you seethe and know.
something you can’t bear to hold for too long but you want to.

he likes fried foods and shrimp, he wishes I knew how to cook and he knows that I can’t for my life. he knows the difference between fine and clumsy,
he wears a watch. It’s black and boxy, and his socks are always funny-looking. He has this one pair, it is dark with green stripes, and he has this other pair they are hot orange and spotted with small horses, that are reared backwards like they can’t bear it anymore.
his mom is crazy and he’s the strangest person you will ever meet and he’ll make you laugh at the first few things he says to you.
his couch has got bunches of quarters and nickels wedged underneath the cushions and his recycling bin is sticky, filled with empty Coke cans, and he plays the violin; he’s got sheet music all over his room printed from illegal websites, probably.

his windows are always open because he likes being outside in the cold and hot, and he wakes up in the dead of 3 am to close them because he always forgets and it’s just so cold and he’s only wearing a t-shirt and boxers.
he says secrets because he doesn’t think they’re secrets. he says **** and he says
hello, how are you doing? and he speaks in a way that is refined, almost like a lecture,
and the first time you meet him you wonder for a minute if he’s British. and if he lives with his family in an apartment somewhere deep in the dark artsy part of Staffordshire where he sleeps and drinks coffee and gets bags under his eyes and plays computer games and sits under the sun wearing pajama pants and is intelligent and hates studying Latin.

but then you realize he is very homeless-looking at heart, and it’s just the way his voice forms words and the way he talks. and he has a high laugh
that you like.

she was a bird, kind of. The kind that was easy to free, you know those ones you hear outside your window on a late spring afternoon, when the sky isn’t quite yet pink but you know it will be soon, and it’s kind of a sad time.

She’s that kind of bird – the little plain brown ones that wait on the trees and suddenly you look out and it’s staring at you, giving you this sort of look that goes, “I know what you are doing and I can see you, deep inside you.” It’s sort of chilling,

but it gives you a warm feeling too, until the tips of your toenails, and you feel very stuffy.

She was that kind of bird. She would often just sit there next to you while you were drawing something, with her hand under her chin, legs crossed, leaning forward. And you would lose all focus of what you were drawing and realize that whatever it was, she would be twenty times more interesting to draw.

So you would casually flick your notebook to a new page and contemplate a few sketch marks, outlining her jaw – and what a jaw. And you would just stare at that jaw and the curve you drew on your paper, and they would look nothing alike. But you hate erasing, but you hate what’s on the paper, and you just can’t take it and you get all frustrated and all the while she’s just sitting there with her hand under her chin, legs crossed, leaning forward, and you mean to jump a little and stand up and stare at her directly in the face,

but you realize that wouldn’t be so nice. And you realize you’re acting slightly stupid, so you keep your poise and take off your shoes and socks, and it’s so nice by the fountain so you dip your toes in a little bit.

Then she turns her head a little too quickly toward you when she notices your toes in the water, and you turn toward her, surprised. She searches your face, your eyelashes, your hands, sighs and leans backward and lies down on the cement, her shirt stretching up a centimeter or two above the waistband of her pants, exposing a white thin cookie piece of her belly.

And then you want to draw her belly, except you can’t see her bellybutton which is the main part, and you get more frustrated, and all the while she’s just lying there staring up at the sky, with her legs uncrossed and her arms splayed out to either side of her, and all the while her blue and brown jacket is – oh no, she’s taking it off, oh no, and now you want to draw her arms except you can’t because you’ve pretty much just proven to yourself within the last few minutes that you can’t draw her at all. It’s so impossible, so you just don’t even open your mouth, and the water is making the bottoms of your toes wrinkly and it’s actually a little cold, so you look at her hair.

So you look at her hair rolled out clumsily on the cement and it’s beautiful, and it’s so unfair what she is, and you don’t even know what to do with yourself.

he has hands like roses and tigers, and I can’t think of anything that could be better.
I don’t let a thing control me except for what I’m feeling, and sometimes it seems like there are pretty wings pricking in my stomach, but I think that’s only because of him.
stripping off black duct tape in a room full of once-empty walls, I lose my focus. something tells me that this is real,
this is more than I could have known before.
but he doesn’t know that I’d read him stories out of old picture books until he fell asleep,
that I’m horrible at chemistry and braiding hair,
that I would love to just once, share a box of Nerds or m&m;’s or sour straws, and laugh about how colorful our skin gets.