among open containers

lemniscate is a slick way of saying symmetrical. double-looped vow
to twist off. broken seal. spiracle edged with yet-to-happen events

that sway previous mishaps. what follows is slipping to take another
sip from behind the wheel among perennials and other dewpoints.

chamfered corners appear easy for turning with a fair share of sunlight
and circulating air. to know a present and absent thing differently. way

of gazing through a spectral frame to control 4 square inches tomorrow.
to be infused with espaliered qualities such as grace. there’s a box

that simulates tiers of chaos by adding stimuli until a body shuts down.
the craft of building up to take in. this one’s for holding trust. a sweet

belief of ethical sourcing from the ancients. recycled forever. or 50
chances for clean breath 2 hours at a time. your supple vessel implies

more. beyond beaker. bottle. bowl. bursting with some extra we don’t
perceive. the alluvial handshake between effect and its preceding

cause. delayed-choice experiment projecting verso/recto. turned
leaf. our obedience placed forward to make a better choice.

dog walk

a lamp looks like a hawk poised to strike inside a mist but doesn’t register
as fear. an artless situation that aims to best the city grid with a flood

of surface. red pouring can turn black fast or is spread to reach the picture inside practice
seen through pooled repeating. it’s often said we’re mostly

empty. even in our saturation. and so is each thing we sense. complex interplays among
splendid favors. feet in colloquy with nowhere special.

it’s the hour of fabulous taxa. a mystic pulp of what’s aloof thinly latching
to what’s wrought: orthodox steeple. blinking stack. rivets of a drain. what

slides: birds through branches late to bud. alley grease. a train slinking in gaps. another corner turned. another tactic. another dour pedestrian coxed

by middle distance. slow dial movements under the double fold of a parallax sky. submissive deportment. bearing a tiny sack. praying for relief.

still there

you say your mostly bent body is disbanding
in doubt. but that’s the part i believe. your arc.
your innuendo. affection without hope of exchange.

there’s always at least two of me—one sometimes
plays the strength card. plots intercepts. tests vortices.
hosts runtimes to render no additional disputes.

other days i relish your dark divinities—lehrstück
structures when they fail. rivals succumbing to fire.
a false spreadsheet managing miles of macadamias.

out of reach is the sweetest math. beyond stars
of the open districts in numbers that don’t observe
grasping. so remote nothing ever clocks an orbit.

this is not a heist movie. or tender for extra-biblical
relief. or some pliable icon set on a sill under the moon
sickling into your dreams. it’s the open road between

billows and tires pulsing like dog day cicadas. to crash
doing Waze a favor by pressing not there to revise
the past site of a wreck. so for the future: still there.

like cement

when we make love, what’re the atoms doing? our minuscule servings. i read they stack to be a paste or glue in the profile of a shell we can’t hear. apply heat and what doesn’t fly away as vapor stays behind to collect as something brutal. fused. lumpy and gray. like cement. if we grind this to a powder and add water—needles then plates then sheets will bind, grow outward, reach for neighboring granularity to achieve a mesh. an exothermic rearrangement carefully managed to not split from within. to slowly cure and find unexplored pockets of each other not touched. risking the danger if what we’ve created cracks, it stays cracked. a broken window. you on one side. me the other. lacking the mechanics to move across the gap. knitting capacity, lost.

beauty like transparency does not heal when charm is too thinly spread. when the chemistry is finished. so we struggle to explain why matter should feel like anything. how we are emergent yet can’t collapse our boundary problem. left to seek escape by saying each of us can choose to try measuring chance and not change. or decide not to watch and go another way like dreamy covariates beyond theory describing all the parts. why not be each other’s unfinished addressee? unprepared preparation? a pledge beyond competence that rises to a plan. unless our entropy extends to where we’re both unreachable to do the work our systems need to adhere. attraction no longer pulling our bodies together. drifting. weakening with the expanse of our parting.