Status Updates From Please make me pretty, I do...

Walking across homelands after the longest time, those winters, this spring. The core of a star as kidney stone.

Step in and the showerhead forgets its place, decides where to make of your shadow, where to kill its flickers. Step out and a mouth belts out cries for other mouths having been there. Answer for this via what it wants to order in the restaurant. In the yellow fields outside, the crickets sound our irritations. Some sweaters age faster than skin, the itch a reminder of dry riverbeds.

PRAYER

for lost causes like the gravity of granola in mornings. The heaviness of missing bacon fat. Or the folds of you when you stretched on top of me then back then forth. Or the calling of us in the long day times and the reappearances of birds like mixtape summers. It sounds the same. And the need for dancing with our toes stumbling on pebbles as cold waltz.

afflicted with such lowness so often no longer sudden

just low

dark sunset small orange left

the sky’s a stupid canvas

it’s all formless good things have form

that’s what skeletons are for

not for cradling falls from towers

(friend, what’re you doing down there?)

(friend, when did you start croaking?)

(friend, how high can you jump?)

(jump … I could be your princess)

(I’m cute enough to stop you croaking)

(these nights, I also find myself croaking)

I can’t jump.

(but … I could kiss you?)

(but … then you’d kiss me back, green and sloppy)

Please—said to no one in particular—don’t kiss me.

The mirror’s crowfooted

not me. Afro’s gone Medusa again.

Every coil’s its own Hydra.

I’m adventuring with a comb.

“Where and who do I go with
without
myself?”

Second elegy