So, I said

I fall asleep on the worn leather sofa

the previous renters left behind

after they found the kitchen leaks.

We don’t mind the waves and currents.

 

We brought flowering plants in

from outside, in hopes to make the

air between us more breathable.

I learned today that orchids are parasites

living in the elbows of tropical trees.

 

I begin my sentences with pronouns

followed by verbs, while you stick to

the conjunction “so”. So, the kitchen

 

floor needs bailing again.

I suggest we install a drain and let the floods

come and go as they please.

 

2:03, pm. When I fall asleep on the leather sofa,

I rest my head on the copy of Neruda’s

“Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair”

that you gave me, hoping the words bleed through

and we’ll have something in common.

Speechless

A mountain stream of thought: clarity. Pouring from a vacuum, in the midst of which I stand, there is language. A prairie of lowercase letters sway in the breeze of speech, interrupted only by the unruly height of the occasional “l” or “b”. Beyond lies the forest of the uppercase. Beginnings wait there, between the trunks of our “P’s” and “Q’s”.

I collapse into the lowercase, covered, drowning in codependent words like “such” and “as”. I strain my jaw open to take a breath and find that language is already there, flooding in and out of my lungs so that I am suffocating.

The words are written, unspoken, debilitating, decapitating, broken and meaningless without context; the words are a hell of nonentity, the words are smoke in my lungs, the words are poison in my thoughts – the words are… O! the words!

Speak, I command myself. The oxygen slowly seeps from my bloodstream as I sprawl out in speechless agony. I grasp for something spoken. The world is turning dark; I clasp the closest set of phonemes and speak:

Help.

The War of 1991

A cloud gathers behind the windows, fogging the glass. The glass curves, like an exit lane, but there is no exit. The cloud goes nowhere, degrading into fog. Pressure; building, and building. The atoms excite; heat. The fog is oppressive; the room is a steam engine. Pounding; the atoms push against the window pane, one by one by one. The curvature creaks in complaint against the pressure. A scream of white flags sliver and snake across the pane. There is release.

We creep through the cracks like children let out of school. The air is open. We run through the streets to see every windowsill decorated with broken glass. The barriers between the internal and external are now permeable. We’ve learned to let the open air inside like a lost stray. Century-old portraits on the mantle now weather more rapidly, but the faces look younger.

7:20, PM: a boy sits on the porch with a head cold. As he sits, the fog crawls slowly back through the windows and his eyes grow red. I sit across the street and dully rub my own burning eyes. All down the road, from this coast to the next, we red-eyed youths sit on our porches beside a plastic bag of medicines, unable to sleep because the fog has crept from the window to our beds.