[In a dream I cry and you pick me up]

—or is it the other way around? I was tired, persistently. Can you relate? Was it a virus or a ‘social contagion’ and what would it mean if the latter? The leaves sway, but gently, because the breeze is mild. The light from the window is oblique. The coconut oil gave my skin a sheen. I brushed and brushed until every snarl and tangle was resolved. 10:43am on July 3rd, 2025, and I am still naked. This is not an attempt at seduction. You say I like to remind people that I’ve got a body. The tiles are blue, the nettipot is blue, the oven mitts are blue, the sponges, the dish soap. By the sound of it, something is being trimmed, edged, whacked, blown. At any moment, I feel someone is going to gape through this window. Denise’s dogs bark once, twice, thrice. I’m writing with the dad pen. I’m asking for help with the heavy and the unwieldly. I’m reading you the Dante translations I checked out from the library. Your favorite is the Longfellow. I’m keeping tabs on my bruises as they take on a yellowish hue. I’m playing the autoharp but I don’t know what the fourth chord ought to be. It’s more vulnerable when my literal body is what’s at stake. Song, likewise, feels more vulnerable than speech. From whence the queer feeling that I can’t lie to you. I heard the clatter of a ladder. A strand of hair falls on my arm. Neurasthenia is a disease of civilization. The cartoon robber baron in the Instagram ad for a class on the Guilded Age has a gin blossom. The jade plants reach towards that selfsame light. M’s friend hunger strikes for Palestine.

[M’s friend hunger strikes for Palestine,]

And all I know is the last line, the one I’m quietly stalking towards. Straining, shaking, pate aching. Taste of coffee in my mouth, but I was looking for the water of life. I was looking for a cool room—for you. One that would maintain its hard edges for the soft gazes of the yet living. Engage with me now, while I’m alive you say. Anyone could opt out, enter the rose zone, go cloudlike in the ongoing now. What kind of cosmos operated at the edge of a threat? I was looking out the window, through the fire escape, towards where we used to smoke. Someone was running out of honey while someone else was running out of money. I was used to study: its diligent beginnings and its extravagant collapses. Sure, you could write with the edge of a knife, but what’s written in this needless smoke but floods of bloody lust. Don’t implicate eros, eat the word lust back up. The pearl of great price was potable water. And what was trauma but a flood of bloody lust. Honey, we’re all implicated. Your gaze softer than science, greater than money, a fire escape from the convolutions of my inner prisons, roseate petals caressing my ear. I was looking for the water of life but all I had was the taste of coffee in my mouth.