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JANUARY


ENTRY 7: January 15. 2025	A note on the desk, Your interest in anthropology should help you to understand my turn away from your culture. I imagine myself drawing the scars below my breasts, a new shape, carved by me and not your imagination. A new sexual dimorphism, you are left out. A new shape unable to reproduce with you, a new song you do not understand. Soon your son will live with people you refuse to see, crepuscular. Ann sits hollow in the morning. The walls reflect the glow of the light outside, a dim blue which spreads across the wooden panels. She gazes at her shoes lined neatly, heels together and waiting to be worn. The house is charged with the movement of water through the pipes, a faint murmur keeping her motionless on the couch, waiting for something to change. Finally, as the water continues, Ann goes to the shoes and dresses herself. Light slowly fills the sunken valley, coming over the hill and shining the edges of the tree branches. Ann pictures the orange glow as she moves through the house. Her thoughts turn to the crepuscular people. She watched them often from her front window, or the small square one in the bathroom, watched their forms slip from the buildings across the way, trailing fabric, perhaps like crows, she thinks, black flocks morphing and changing with each other, then scattering as the sky became white.
ENTRY 6: January 12. 2025	I watch the balloon dance softly in the corner of my room, warmed in the current of a candle, it rises from where it has come to rest, midway up the wall, light from the candle reflects from the folds, crystal walls shine through a stone, a ruby. My own ghost, my ruby heart rises and sinks down again, happy in the dark of the evening, moving without me speaking, turning without my touch, another animal.
ENTRY 5: January 11. 2025	some poems I never sent I saw green beetles spreading from the belly of the fox in the gutter, a flourescent rosette further up the road we came upon another gem beetle (like a sapphire), you asked if I could pick it up like that, bare hands against the road --- only things that are A needle and thread pulled through east Germany three cut lines in the lid of my cup a sailboat standing smooth and languid hair layered over coal blue fields and poplar rows the fur of a soft winter rabbit my lips reflected in the glass carelessly evoke yours --- another, another, December loosening around the lozenge this mouthful of silk goes down like smoke train at the station, train pulling away the thoughts that seem true only last until I come back to dawn, am I good, am I good am I with you, am I with you a band of sunlight not even warm, yet I can't keep my eyes from following — to the trim boards — the carpet on the floor — and by evening — only 4 — gone again — just the last glow of your hands pulling night over me.
ENTRY 4: January 9. 2025	You once left a pamplet on my dashboard, it asked in all capitals IS HELL REAL? over flames. It's probably still somewhere in the metal cube they turned my subaru into, perhaps stacked and crushed atop a hundred other cars. I don't think hell is real, because no place can be all bad. Of course I miss you, but even taking my glasses off on the train isn't all bad, I just see things blurry. I can pay more attention to the music. In time, any feeling lets you feel something else. When I was playful I walked down the hill to your house, it was night and snowing. You came and met me at the bridge with red lights, or maybe it was the blue one I don't remember, but you looked all bundled up. I had snow boots on and we just walked because what else was there? But I confess I struggled to stay playful when I thought of that tonight, as your ghost suddenly rushed to my side, above a trainyard on the other side of the world. You were trying to walk me home but I admit, I started to cry. But you only meant to remind me of that simple night, when there was no reason
ENTRY 3: January 5. 2025	I noticed a Magic Eye book on my friend's counter. Yeah, M's getting into them, he's really excited that he can see them now. I'm looking at the first pages, the easy ones, hearts and fish, remembering something, Have you ever gotten to the second level? Like when you go too deep and the image gets multiplied, and you have to blink and go back? She doesn't believe me, Second level? You mean seeing a different picture? M comes in, I think you're seeing it the other way, there's two ways to see the image and I think you're seeing the cross-eyed one. Does the image pop out for you or look cut into the page? There's two ways? I've only ever seen the image inverted, and I can never tell what it is. I wake from a dream back home in Berlin, I'm lying on my couch looking at my cowboy boots sitting on the other side of the room. Something's wrong, my eyes aren't opening all the way, and my vision is blurred. I feel the door open and my roommate come in, trying to mouth words, what's going on? the words are slurring, R: I came in to check on you, you were dreaming, everything is alright. She looks down at me, scared, holding my hair which is wet to my scalp, I'm figuring out what happened, was I talking? R: Yes, you were saying everything. You were talking and sometimes the words didn't make any sense, she demonstrates. Her words are like mud coming out of her mouth. So I ran in to wake you. I thank her and try and get up from the couch but I am so tired, I keep sinking back. I'm in the basement of our house and walking, there are my boots on the floor, but they're horizontal against the wall, am I lying down? I begin to see things differently, I tell J about my last relationship and she helps me realize something. I always knew it had something to do with control, I knew they needed to be in control, I knew they were manipulating me, but I couldn't understand why they still didn't want me. I was trying so hard, and I was giving up as much control as I could, they could have had anything they wanted, why was I not enough? J points out, They were hollow, they had nothing. They were stealing your words and your ideas. I think I already knew this, but why stop? Why wasn't I interesting enough to keep taking from? They needed to be in control. People liked you more than them. When we'd sleep together I'd still go away, go away from the bed. I could never come unless I went away from the bed, from my body. I discovered it my last year of high school, the first time I came. I tried not thinking about my boyfriend at all, I went completely into my mind and imagined my fetish, I removed him completely. It was only when I was fully away, in a new body I created, alone, that I could climax. My partner never came back into sex for me, not really. To paths emerged, I could have sex to come or have sex to be with my partner. The paths almost never crossed. At night, I very rarely imagined a partner, that never felt better than just going into a completely imagined body, constructing everything new. I talked to my friend about this once, my fetish is separate from sex with a partner. I don't combine them. When I want to come I have to leave my partner and go into my mind, if I'm trying to come I can't have them involved. D: I never thought about a fetish being separate from sex, they seem like the same thing you know? My fetish was something I carved out, a secret that could create an illusion for my partner, I am with you, this is because of you. but it was a trick I used, because it really only meant I had gone far away. Of course I wished it wouldn't work that way. What would it feel like to come from the thought of someone I knew? They'd wanted to talk during sex, but say what?, I didn't know what to say because the words didn't mean anything to me, I want you to... Me, knowing, I can't. My vision blurs, I imagine new walls and new skin, new people that have never existed, begin the same patterns I've used for ten years. One day, things change. I stop wanting to think about my fetish. I lie in bed and allow something new, I realize this is what everyone else has felt, wanting to be with them, for them to see, for the pressure to come from them, suddenly, and I see things a new way.
ENTRY 2: January 4. 2025	The powerlines between our houses, stay through the rain. I never knew you went there too circled the hum of the wires to the place beneath the lines where the sky forms it's own current. What did you think of? When you'd leave the yard beyond the trailer going towards the trees, as though in a dream did I only imagine the day we walked down the tracks and found a pit lined with quartz reflecting each afternoon. Now the side of that road is where we found we didn't need to keep driving that at some point we could turn to each other and through your mouth I could return then wind-torn and thoughtless
ENTRY 1: January 2. 2025	poststroke I woke in the morning and put my hand to my thigh, finding the indent of my pelvis now caved upwards, the hard shell of an egg laid in the night, the pain, was unbearable. I couldn't make out your face at first, like your features were always shifting. When I turned to you in the dark club your face blurred, I realized immidiately that I could never control you. So I let you lead, filling in every gap I could. In the hospital, I was afraid and nauseous, the fruit within me was not a new life at this point but only a foreign body. The nurse squeezed the growth and told me my intestines had broken out of their lining, routine procedure, she rolled the ball with her palm until it was almost flat, I pretended the pain was gone and went home to lie on the floor. I don't remember the moment that your face crystalized, when you became the most beautiful thing that I had ever seen. Before this, your body had reminded me of the caterpillars I used to grow, the ones that didn't eat enough before they pupated, and remained green leather, calloused and small. When I returned to the hospital I walked bent at the hip, could no longer straighten my thin body. I swept across the street like grass in the wind. A passerby asked me if I needed a wheelchair but I could not relinquish my legs, my knees, still holding stiff. The infection turned my body red that night. When I stood up, my chest was wooden, the sheets were my blood, on fire beneath the skin. The doctors began to whisper above my bed, using the words flesh-eating. No one's form has moved outside the world like yours. I did not know my eyes could see like that. When your face first felt like God we were sitting in a bakery, one too nice, our conversation always stuttering, and your eyes lit by sun through the blinds, the softest brown that they were also green. In the early morning they removed the growth with a scalpel, leaving the wound open for months, to drain. That spring, I could look directly into the hole left in my body, red walls that led to cherry darkness. No longer inhabited by the routine bacteria, which my body had chosen not to fight. I never knew my body could give out, become overwhelmed from within. I know now I'll surrender someday. You dulled everyone around me.