On the way here

Wild garlic by the verges is lit from within. If I had a pen on me I’d sketch piles of gravel, blue, pointillist-looking where trains come to a stop & one word slides past another. Dun cross-hatch of bog or furze, ground like dark velvet. So much giving way: a muzzle of land & the flat tooth of the city. All the sparkly stickers I found in my childhood room, all the eyelashed creatures, all the mosaic hand-mirrors and pictures taken in photobooths, faces shadowed small. On the train my notebook falls open on the page where I tested all the pens before throwing the wasted ones out. Here’s a curl of exclamation: eee. Accidental, like how I never really managed to leave the city, in love in increments with the mismatched furniture. One college boyfriend told me it was basic to have a house in a story that fragments in keeping with the woman, so I made sure to include both in everything I wrote from then on, a fragmenting house, a fragmenting woman. All the plasticky weights used for correcting, subjected here to their own test. Here’s the stuffy linger of Sharpie marker, patches and thatches of highlighter pen.


Bouldering

The crags in the forest clearing
look like they are planning something,

gathered crystalline;
...