everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues,
and this is mine:

love is not blindness and his especially
his love was not blindness
he saw everything:
what was there
what wasn’t

nonetheless he rested at reading-glass distance
everything in hyperfocus and bigger, like he wanted
like a futuristic camera: oversaturated, overbright

love is not blindness—

love is literature, or wine, or a lens flare
his filled my gaps with what he wanted there
he saw more than the camera did

I cannot condemn, nor could I ever, his amber propensity
to imagine me. to beg literature is a dodge
of responsibility of which we are all
most equally
guilty

and the devil is in the details
that stitched up such an
achingly different forever
than the one he saw

love is not blindness—
his wasn’t, and mine wasn’t
—but it is literature: permission to fill the page
permission to distrust, like I did then
like I do still

forgive me my own amber propensity
to feel the paradox
there

The Night Sky

Taking a walk and it’s late, dark out,
sky full of clouds.
Family in beds, sleeping.
Watching rows upon rows of feral shadow clouds roll
across the sky in heavy sheets.
Air is charged, crackling from the energy
of my body as I walk by naked.
I have stolen the stars tonight.
Walking slowly, no thoughts,
my feet among the trees
trees blades of grass my immense form looking down
At mountains the size of mole hills
aerial, seeing as the raptor must.
Granted immense powers such as hyperfocus and
watching buck leap elegantly miles below.
Body is now composed of innumerable celestial bodies
Time is become me,
Form curving elegantly
fabric of spacetime billowing
in the crystalline winter wind.
As I walk I am everything and nothing.
The universe breathes throughout me
stellar nebulas exhale clouds of interstellar gas and dust
across my chest up my arms and neck red giants and
supergiants my legs erupting supernova, black holes
behind my knees across my face trillions of asteroids and
meteoroids sailing coming together in fantastic collisions
all this and looking up the night sky,
Devoid,
clouds moving quick under nothing absolute nothing.

Puff, puff, puff
Watching my death blow from my mouth
I feel it settling in
Making me feel like the world is in hyperfocus
Details find their way to the surface
I stare at the ceiling as it feels like the world is swaying
I wish I was staying
Falling and I can't find my grace
I let my fingers fumble with the next mistake
Each puff and I feel dead
To each their own aphrodisiac

My dorm room was bright this morning. It was disorienting.
The sky outside was a cloudless, striking neon blue.
The air was so crisp and clean, I could hardly feel it going in and out.
It all sparked to create a diffused sense of well-being.

Gone, it seems, were the concrete bunker feels of winter.

There's been some loose talk of ‘spring’ lately—I thought it was fake news—but from my third floor lattice windows I could see what looked like people outside. They were walking in the sunshine, riding bikes, throwing frisbees, kicking ​​hacky sacks, a couple was making out in the grass—it was a riot of activity.

Sunny skiffed out of her room (which looks like a hotel room trashed by some rock star), she seemed lighter than air. Three days ago, she announced there was someone of “particular personal significance,” in her life (translate: girlfriend).
Start the schmaltzy, string-drenched soundtrack—love is in the air.

Our challenge now is to carve out a poised and measured final act to our undergraduate years. There’s a scurrying, cynosure, beehive, hyperfocus to labs and classes, a heightened, almost cinematic quality, as if, up to now, we’ve only been practicing for some undefined ‘real thing.’
.
.
Songs for this:
Daylight by Harry Styles
Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing by Michael McDonald
Dizzy (feat. Alfie Templeman & Thomas Headon) by chloe moriondo
.
.our cast: A reader once asked, “Who are these people?” (a solid question) So now I do a cast list.

Sunny, (suitemate) 21, a (pre-med) molecular, cellular, and developmental biology major, is a cowgirl from Nebraska (seriously, she has a quarter horse and barrel races). She’s an outspoken fem-facing ladies-lady.

Your author, a simple, multinational, upper-crust, trust-fund baby from Athens, Georgia who's also a molecular biophysics and biochemistry major (pre-med).

My body likes
to be the thing
you fidget with.

So, feel free
to come and
hyperfocus
with me.