splinter days
Souls are separate from skin and eyebrows are perfect rings. The youtube album is on the tv, it’s called “stars end”. My big toe bumps against the guitar’s wood.
It is definitely on my mind: crunching shells at the ocean, the cloud hanging over the horizon, umbrella of grey mist. We released ourselves from the waves. The shells on my kitchen windowsill have no labels or writing. I can’t remember which ones were from that time. The shape of an ear, or a very small shoulder blade.
The blinds are leaking. She speaks about the earth getting warmer, before the ice age. All these parts, elsewhere. I liked it better when she summarized parts from her own life.
Fire bubbles around the screen. In the book, she also went to rockaway beach. I read two books and both authors were taking care of their two daughters in the winter.
Taste a different temperature of air and let our eyes rest on new materials. At A & A’s house: their couch got reupholstered, some gritty brown fabric. I came in through the breezeway, knocked over the glass animals. Took off my reeboks and put on her birkenstocks.
Spinning in hard water, someone’s trying to churn their car out. The plants from the terracotta porch are now on the planks. Accidentally drove my toy car up the ice hill, like slick skin, scary plastic. No return. I look for the faraway pain like a sound in the other room.
I tried to take an iphone picture of the moon over the mississippi river, but it was towards the bridges and behind the black tree branch. I eat the giant grapefruit she left me - pulled out the splinters. I wanted to write, like tears. Moon on the water like a thick wavering line.
Later I find the light yellow tooth on my keyboard. There is a small square opening like a window to look inside the basement.
Instead, memories change as we grow older and think about them differently. Factories light up in the nighttime. Then the city fills out, outline of sandcastles.
Boys were on the stage singing in autotune and wearing skeleton shirts. Everyone knew my sister. I held my tote bag between my boots. I wonder who lives in my brick building.
Every time I drive down Chippewa, I pass by Simple Pleasures (with “& Boutique” crossed out, using thin white paint, anything can be revealed). In the picture, the sky is blue with no clouds. Neon kratom sign and CBD SOLD HERE.
The image looks washed out in the sun: “dream girl”. There’s always a motorcycle parked outside. A man is walking towards it from QT, in the middle of the road, wearing a Blues shirt.
Depository. This was something about our combined soul. The wind hits my window and whacks it.
When I step out of my car, glazed ceramic world. The sidewalks are shiny smooth lanes with scoops from where people’s feet padded down, melted, then hardened. My mid-sized gray Schnucks cart.
I get full for awhile. I wanted to play guitar. My lips feel like rubies.
Turned left out of N’s street by the Wendy’s, cars were still coming. After the session, I go to the bathroom. There’s a painting of the letter D over the sink. I put a mint in my mouth that I got from the baskets around the hallway.
I knew that underneath the hardness, it was starting to float on its own water. I lifted the ice with my red fingers, like peeling chips of paint off the wall in my elementary school gym.
We counted the money from the cracked pitcher on the window ledge between two houses of blood brick going lengthwise. The neighbor’s window was a light box blaring another music we couldn’t decipher, hitting the music of our show.
Then we packed the cables and blasted “QUEEN JANE” like a family, singing with our fists, all caught up in our own feelings about it.
If I write down the description of the odor wafting, and the sound of the box fan, will the memory reveal itself to my future self? Consciousness is travelling, flocks of birds.
I sucked on the square edge of a riccola cough drop, turned down Skinker and all the familiar paths came natural. I texted while I drove and had no remorse.
The exoskeleton removed from the shell of wings, laying there with legs up, a giant crumb on my desk. It makes me think of the grapefruit seed on my laptop, or the chipped seed from the watermelon hunk at the classical concert.
Slanted. I stared at it. It would harden around the facts of my life that I don’t like.