We won’t evade starvation to shrink
Naïve to the death of us,
We find, we find bodies

In the absence
We regress

No one remains
If we debate *** leaves in pink chalk

We proceed
through negatives without shadows

If we find nothing, I will live without

Doubt
We don’t go

You might never love me in the way I want you to.  Or the way I need you to.  I like you too much and I know it.  I've gotten over you, but I continue to fall back in intrigue with you at the slightest provocation.

Because I change my mind a million times a day about you.  And at the end of it, I don't believe in you.  But against all good judgment, I recognize all the shadows that move like vertigo through my sleep as yours.  And believe in you again.

The altitude clicks through my head
We join the stagnant air, neon stained
And creep through the hills
Like ghosts of an age almost dead

I’d walk with my people
if I could find them
In the fading light at least
I feel less like a sore thumb

The potential sparks against our ankles
like sirens in the rear-view,
Wading through the space
Only the unknown can inflict.

Fear fails to show
the way we knew it would
And the temp can’t master conversation
So we fall asleep, second row,
standing room only
Fog consumes the sound.

We steep ourselves
in jagged silhouettes
of your piano intro.  
Bathe in dusty memories
like sepia-toned snapshots.

We will hear you
until we, too
are too sore for sound.
We shiver through
flickering silence

Far less.

Lost like a static low.
Where affinity breaks down,
freeze crowds against
our feeble fish-bowl walls.  

We can’t tell cold
from native skin

Braking black-and-white
festers at our feet.
Extremities unknown.

Confident,
we wander.

Nightmares must be gentle to do any harm.
They stagger through my unconscious mind
the way the dead tips of palm leaves flicker in the wind.
In the absence of sleep, I converse with them
from my second story window,
through the air above the boulevard.

They break out in golden sweat
and their leaves clash and rustle
when I ask where all the clouds have gone.
In the face of such hostility,
I crave the trees of home,
happy to accept their fate
even as they begin to wreak
of the death of summer themselves.

They shed leaves like flesh
that bleed smoke the flavor of rotting earth
as they burn through late October.

Light dissolves
and shadows move like vertigo,
the way Lizzy Volkamer moved through the Midwest
the summer before last.

The palms won’t speak to me
And Lizzy watches dead leaves gather.
Until they’re burnt, she won’t speak to me either,
though she misses Lo dearly.
Because Lo only lives in the summer months
and is miles away by now.

Ashes began to fill a sky already in decay,
so she swam through August to escape.
She followed the heat to where it settles in other seasons,
where vicious sleep peruses such fugitives.  

Se faltan las nubes
whisper the palm trees in her dreams
even as the wind picks up
and offers to help them say so much more

I am the emptiness that exists in the kitchen
at such hours, late and lonely.
I can operate only in this space,
at night when the answers become irrelevant
and the present tense becomes the past.
I rely on the sporadic sounds of movement of traffic below the window.

I am the scratchy sound of death cab
on the Buick’s aged speakers.
I claw at the insides of the aluminum
and seep out through cracked windows.
I shore myself against a distant past
despite better judgment.

I am born of the vivid summer heat.
I ride the train to the loop
and back out to the city’s extremities,
like blood through a body.
I sweat under layers of wool humidity.

I am the concrete paving the boundless suburban streets.  
I exhale tar and forest
as the rain begins to fall, long after dark,
cooling the still-hot surface.
I crave the tires and feet that brace themselves against me.  

I am the slow moving clouds at dusk, the color of tea.
I ignite as the sun slouches toward the horizon.
I consume the jets that depart from O’ Hare in every direction.

I am familiar laughter, striking ears in palpable waves.
I move most freely though vicious August heat,
But even in such passive chilled air, I proceed.

I careen toward what has been named peace,
though it’s been forgotten over the years.
I have fled the immortal city for one more ageless.
I crave the smell of the death of summer.

I pass into a state of suspension
like the bodies that surround me, never born but built.
I trace the veins and find no flesh,
but only bones beneath them.
I stretch willing to bridge the gaps that exist.

I am the tangled freeways moving among one another
in the heart of a city accused of being heartless.  
I am guiltless in the face of isolation.
I hold blood hostage on a daily basis.  

I am lethargic, gold-soaked afternoons
Bearing such spacious skies.
I lie beneath gilded light
like the lazy palm lined streets.
I am the trembling airwaves,
And I disarm the distance itself.

As the vivid heat of Illinois
sheds
the profuse breathing forest
and crowded meadows,

smug evenings
bleed
insect symphonies.

As pressurized homes
Exhale
oblivious life
cushioned in air artificially chilled,

one thousand Julys
forever in transit
traverse golden cloud ceilings
above so many absent walls

until savage nights
visit for the sake of vacant freeways,
and neon blooms
shadows, brake lights, and flickering darkness