Primer for the Lodgings

Burnt from the day’s grease of lilting fingers and coins, I walk home
with lace twined around my fingers, counting my lost breath. All day,

the red-crusted children at the shoe store have clamored, egrets within
the vastness of a field, air rising warm, ferocious with implication,

splitting against the metal crane in the sky. The onus of change upon us
raking husks through the phantom sky. Latticed sun hums, bougainvillea

angles over the turpentine porch. Russet abounds, all through the trees.
All that descends descends too soon. Gleams in every curvature. Like his

mapped hands, dusted with soot, handing out lighters at the fair like a primer
for every lodging to come. He gleams in every curvature, horseshoe neck tilted

back, candy fluff dissolution into hapless need. Or the way he plunges his hands into
the ice bucket, unearths those viscous cubes and laughs as they fall like dilapidated

hearts. Can hardly think of the water. His palm’s lichen touching these arms,
the way we danced through a house unborn, that residence in which time

was a slippage we returned to in squandered heat. There are so many carvings
you can make for yourself. Shuffle sheets with lilac feet, crush lilacs in favor

of sickness. Listen to kettle and fridge humdrums, ooze as the knives grow sweeter
each day. In the end, it’s all perpendicular. He’s withholding the continent, suturing

surrender. You’re pressing cotton balls into vinegar, and he’s in the garden in limestone
white, gulping luster and talking into the ears of fresh dogs. I cleave that animal speech,

watch it cover my eyes like a blue film. Like any tractable creature, I will be formidable
as long as the expanse allows it. Somewhere, there is a whole unbitten thing. We will lose

ourselves foraging for it. Each night the puppetry, the soprano and its plaintive stars.
Let me call all the ruptures inwards, give them misbegotten names. Let me build cities

of ruin, germinate in them, all the while knowing that when I wake, I wake in fog.
We lived in that velvet room. We kissed the monster. We cut the inked nib of sleep

clean off and trembled as the red flowers grew, stumbling with the sirens, sewing them
into our wildest breath. Blue veins opening at the inclines and in the distance, him:

four-faced wonder unspooling in yarn. Because the cleanest war is entropy. The mind
can forget but the skin wants to know. The conditions of entry. The hands that unfurl copper

and leafed grates. The door that opens & closes. The way they amass those riveted dreams.
Bone emerging in moonlight after traipsed feet. This molded birth. This endless catastrophe.

Artwork Courtesy of our featured Artist Hassan Zahreddine