KZSPYGV

Poem

I am through New York City on this train,
the horizon spindling at its midpoint,
and all the apartment buildings are anthills.

All the words I had preordained to be in this poem are very resistant;
I’ll then just fry my thoughts in a scalding grease vat, pluck them sputtering with a slotted spoon and lay them on a paper towel on a plate to cool.

Leaving the house this morning, I noticed that the traffic cones had all gathered for a meeting, huddling near the traffic cones all gathered for a meeting.
And I thought recently, that I should know the names of all the vegetables in the produce section, from the bok choy to the swiss chard, it sounded comforting.
And how do snails and slugs procreate?

Now there are the times when you hear the clock ticking and the times when you don’t, it’s really strange to surface into the noise as might your face floating in the pool rise to the surface and peel the water back.

I should try to peel all my oranges in one go, and
I imagine my hands full of garnets, cold and slick as snakes, sliding through my fingers. And so there are things that are beautiful when they’re small and alone and I may or may not be one of them.

The calamari ribbon thoughts there all coiled on the plate. You could pick up one or two, and lay them on your tongue, let them sit like questions, then grind them between your back molars as your knuckles into the ridgeline of my shoulder, I didn’t know I was as tense as a suggestion.

Or I’ll just fritter the time between my left hand and my right, waver my fingers in the empty space, and try to stop imagining the air around my body billowing up against me like a marshmallow in a microwave.

this is how I feel on some days

thepianofarm:

on some days. just not today.

by Paul Octavius via thiscitycalledearth

Jillian Blackwell

A handful of precipices

If the tea whistles
ghostly pale in my cup
If my face underlit by lamplight and yours
upside down
these diver gulps of tea

I would be playing piano music as loudly as possible
my fourth floor fire escape door open
the cliff of the building
the sun that sets further down Sansom street
pink flushed against the building across

The plants all killed on the windowsill
but the onion I found in the refrigerator grown up like a tulip

My room arranged by rectangles, with no worthwhile window
my fitted bed sheet curled up at the corners, its tired brown flowers

Cezanne apples spoiling on your table
a round red apple forgotten at the bottom of my bag, so disappointing at the first bite

My lips at the empty space between your two eyebrows and your nose
cold in April still, my apartment floor cold
I, without a plan
fingernails uneven, useless as a purple cabbage
this colander month, if I hadn’t
slipped through each day

Ten Steps around the Origin of a Circle

1

I will let this falling be a baptism

I will use my lungs for suitcases

The gasp of these days will be new as the morning outside your window.

2

I won’t move somewhere warm

I’ll stay right here and move like the earth, create seasons for my life with my rotations,

I’ll wear skirts more, so I’ll have some reason for my spinning.

You said you like skirts.

3

All I want to do is find four walls that stretch out far, far,

For a room so tall I forget about the ceiling.

I want windows,

I’ll put Magritte’s painting of a landscape painting in front of a window in front of my window.

I’ll call it the human condition, know that everything new is just a repetition of something that preceded

Learn how lovely the lenses of perception can be.

4

Maybe I will run out of sleep someday.

If I do, I’ll spend my nights tracing the stripes of your bed sheets,

Meditating on how the weight of your sleeping body lends a curve to those straight lines,

As I might walk a tightrope and dip the line with my footsteps.

Heaviness is coupled to balance, together they are breathtaking and terrifying.

5

We live in upstairs rooms.

We are suspended above the ground, held up by three stories of air.

I tell myself we are floating,

I think about the empty space around us and below us.

6

I string beads of silence into our conversations like pearls,

Placing more space between thoughts,

Then hide the conservations in the attic of my mind,

Maybe you will find them again on rainy days

When you open me like an oyster.

7

You will be wherever I am.

Or maybe I will be wherever you are.

Or maybe I will be wherever your hands are.

8

I will know the grid of this city like the crosshatch of my windowpanes.

I will be the architect to my life.

I will build something here.

There will be no windowpanes or city blocks between us.

9

I will only be as sad as I am when looking out a window.

With a cup of coffee cradled in my hands,

There is sweetness to make the bitterness pleasant.

10

I have ten fingers.

They travel across the terrain of your body.

I am not going anywhere.

I have everything at my fingertips.

[ ___ , said the girl.]: "calling all poetry lovers," said the girl.