stomach a lump of clay on the wheel
spinning this working art and I
dip my hands into water
watch their murky reflection\
let them part the seas
let my skin time travel

the clock reads 11:13
I make a retroactive wish too
late for being late
I miss the missing

a jasmine plant grows
out of itself
on my windowsill now
how old can you call this being
yesterday
mourning beneath the sunrise
I picked the small dried brown blooms
steeped in scent still
tangled in the living flesh
their leaves caught between my fingers
I dropped them onto the soil below
my feet a living earth
and considered them for a time
no more than this body

the day before
I forgot to tell you
a faded rose from the garden sitting atop my bookshelf pressed closely in between spines fell to the ground like love in a moment of unstable equilibrium that would otherwise have been still there I spent the next hour peeling its leathery petals decomposing the rose’s unassuming growth the outer layers a pale pink closer to the core turning browner and browner like a rotting fruit I tried to wrest free another layer of skin not knowing what’s inside and what’s outside when black spindly seeds burst forth out of the bud like so many dark tadpoles a community of becoming collecting on the blanket spread across my knees I wondered about emergence and emergency I thought about viruses and the undead I thought about my sickness and my unliving I feel murkiest now not where the light on my surface has illuminated stained glass in shades of amber and grey but in the places that strain for darkness a small moth rests inside my mouth its wings tickling my canines sometimes I let it flutter in its humid cage or pin it an entomology assignment wriggling in the rising tide of my saliva to underside of my tongue before I chew and swallow I haven’t bled in months and now it all comes my body’s borders blurring and staining my clothes insides outing themselves I feel uncontrolled for the first time in a long time know what it means to release I run through floodwaters shed my shoes and feel the droplets slide down my legs watch the rain form waterfalls at the edge of the sidewalk we keep going through those undead ends these new rivers rush past the traffic lights tangle up in each other no stopping the current not now it’s not past not for this end when I get home, I slather blue goop on the clothes dip my hands into water watch all signs of red disappear in sloshing bubbles a part of and from my body gone like it never happened at all like none of it did ᐧ