left uninspired by the crust of railroad earth

04.08.2026 - Nile River, Wichita Falls, Texas

I was three, no bigger
than a Texan tumbleweed,
and my mother hung the wash out on the line,
wiped the sweat off her brow with her hand.
half an hour later, the clothes were frozen.

Moses sat on a mountaintop
gazing at the promised land,
but it was out of his hands now;
the first hands he feels are feminine:
his mother, his sister,
then Zipporah.
the next he feels are holy.

my flesh is freshly skinned
because of my mother's nails. she is
brushing out the tangles in my hair.
nails against my scalp and against my skin,
again, my mother picking me up
out of the bath.

these hands blanket my stomach
(hands like wool); God
is upset over this one from the river,
just south of the North Wichita.
it's the dark eyes, Moses knows. he dies
the moment God calls him, in Egypt,
somewhere in the Southwest.

this is the first day in which
I am not afraid of you.
you know, when the first bird crashes
and dies out of the sky, a second bird
comes to take over the first bird’s place.
with prophets, it is not so much
like this, not ever.

Spoiler

my family owned this vacation house in Texas, and we would go there every few summers. I have these vivid memories of my mother reading me these stories about Moses while I had bathed, about how he had led the Israelites out of Egypt and into forty years of wilderness. you know the story. I liked Moses, thought he was cool. I wonder if he ever missed his mother, or Miriam. I'm sure God did, too. wonder those things, I mean.

"[write] a poem inspired by the Passover or a poem where Moses or Elijah make an appearance" - @alliyah, hope I did your prompt well. I felt a bit stuck with this, it's not my best work!

04.09.2026 -

I remember the tectonic plate
of your cracked television screen
had segregated and spread across
like the Spanish revival.
I am lonely in every language
but my own.

one particular scene,
there are: different men,
different waves, different birds,
different guns, different names for guns,
all of you many lost, different,
children.

04.10.2026 - staying home will do that to you

how much grief can line
the inside of my mouth, all bruised
and boyish, before I die the way a snake might?
these bodies, no matter what,
mix with shadow.

the last time I saw you,
we were in a car, and we drove for two hours
like Magellan in circles around the outskirts
of town. the river was coursing like the chest
of a swan just about to take flight,
as coarse as childhood hair,
hair without showering.

this town would be better with large fields,
more cows, some highways and cliffs.
now, it is spring, and you are not here,
and my soul is in bed moored by hives
the size of your hands.

Spoiler

some people are so important to your creative identity, even years after the fact. I reassemble you, you reassemble me. everything I do, you are touching it.

04.11.2026 - on the road

on my last day in Chicago, which
didn't feel like my last day in Chicago,
we sat on the stairs outside our hotel
overlooking the courtyard as you
chain-smoked cigarettes doing everything
very quickly. saying
we're on the verge of it, I could be your Kerouac
and you could be my Ginsberg, or Cassady,
and all of this could be our
dharma bums.

04.12.2026 - Las Cruces, New Mexico

there's a mouth out there
with a saltier kiss than the Pacific,
one that caws like seagulls in exodus;
a close friend once told me that I talk too much.
it must be posterity's sign of decay
when nostalgia melts like a cone of ice cream,
not empty, but a gooey sugar-salt in mists of
a phosphene glare from a quarter of the desert's heat.
we spend our evenings watching the white face
of the moon for mushroom clouds we rutted,
and held out forks to one another saying
"taste it, cmon!" I always click
the get directions button in cases
where I'm completely unsure of the water
beneath my feet, wait for the next exit
to bring me to wherever I've decided
home is going to be. you
stretch your calves against sky
that goes for miles, seemingly
never ending.

Spoiler

cocteau wrote:04.13.2026 - Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari



[spoiler]an apparent conflict arises between the body.
the body is all by itself, so many forms of torture.
smooth, opaque, it utters only gasps
and cries. this repulsion is the real meaning of
an all-over persecution: genesis, nondifferentiated.
the latter can no longer tolerate machines.

Spoiler

flames

[/spoiler]

04.14.2026 - invasive species

take off like the bird you are:
beyond the horizon, looking toward Port Angeles.
there are lights in the cold, lights in the night,
the sound of senseless chat and crackling fire
wafting across Dallas Beach
as we use our phones to navigate
nature's cragged stairwells,
up and down and up and down.

there are moments I can supine
from the words you write in direct reference
to the life I've lived since September.
with a little bit of dust under your nails,
you sense something ancient
and dead-yet-still-living in everything;
I felt it in the air on that blonde winter day
you told me you loved me.

the starlings branched above us started to sweat,
their feathers emerald-wet as mallards.

Spoiler

this is unfinished, but I gave up. also, little bird fact: starlings will displace native birds by usurping their nest and destroying the eggs already there. really terrible for local ecosystems. birds are insurrectionary in that way.

04.16.2026 -

my body is best
at disappearing when placed
underneath the sun.

04.17.2026 - Los Feliz, Los Angeles, California

my skin falls from the wrong bones
like sinks, or manmade waterfalls,
both of which I have learned are the same;
Jade tells me to keep my hands above the Mason-Dixon line,
but I’ve got fifteen years tied into knots of green and brown.
I have decided that it is time for a change of scenery:
sometimes I sit by the roadside reading
Bukowski with her perfume on my collar
and her California in my eyes.
it seems, somehow, significant that
I carry on my lips the timbre of its smile.

04.18.2026 - Medford, Boston, Massachusetts

today is the first day
in a week that I am riding the subway
desperate to meet nobody.

there is a row of faces across from me,
some thin like my mother’s and some swelling
with ghosts the way mine once did.
I do not love any of them.
we are rising in the dark like a mountain,
like you driving to the Adirondacks,
catchy acoustic song playing on the radio:
a song like the one you listened to when
you were three years old on your parents’ bed,
faces of Peter, Paul and Mary gleaming out
from the television screen.

picture this: bruises lining my body
like the passengers of this subway lining the seats.
picture this: us standing together, as pale as
the corpse of spring beneath our feet.