There’s a fierce audacity about water:
the way it barges into palimpsest buildings unannounced
the way the buildings are sucked into a void
the way the water barrels our bodies into a concave
cross-referencing us with open tombs.

bedtime is the worst
mama off giggling and cooing
with her latest boyfriend

me sent to my room
ordered not to come out

the thing beneath my bed
oozes out and wants to talk

when the smog finally devoured the dying sun,
the creatures of the night
made a throne of the carnage
and a kingdom of the earth

The dark house sits brooding, high on the hill;
heedless of time passing, of age and decay,
my love walked its halls—he’s roaming them still.

*Dedicated to my five-year-old self

It’s always me
in my carrot cake tweed jacket
its caramel collar taut around my neck
speckled with goosebumps

It’s the first thing they tell you in Temporal Navigation 101:

Time is water,
But it knows no gentle ebb,
Only the rage and riot of rapids.
You can’t go back, the Temporists say;
The currents are too strong.

Early in the morning
I can hear my neighbor’s TV
Reverberating through the tin foil
Walls of her FEMA trailer

(taken from 2020s advertisements)

it’s written in the stars:
the ingeniously simple
magnetic mechanism
of the making process —

The earth tears at her concrete visage
until she can breathe through the cracks.

Listen to the viscous vows of retaliation
she presses through her stuffed throats:

zephyr sings a lullaby into my body
that she may light my eyes and dulcify my tongue

don't listen to her—
⁠the aphorism of my stomach roared in hurt
and reluctantly, i was submerged in its words: