agate

the blossoms called me out tonight while weeping by the reservoir and posing over and onto its still water. with a gentle clatter they prune back their wandering, cresting on the cymbaled turbulence from the chill. they step falteringly on the tooth of each wavelet. the petals are sitting wrong in the charcoal. the old lombardy poplar is busy whispering for me to come pay my respects, goading me for my inability to sketch the blossoms from memory. the shapes evade me, as if they were sawn away, carelessly, by someone who thought there might be more important things to remember. i watch another blossom skitter down onto the reservoir, a breathless, quiet sob echoing off the rocky rim of the reservoir’s mouth.

my throat burns. not because fire season was rough; my lungs suffered then—and now, still—but my larynx saved itself. no, this time around, my throat is scorched from sesquiterpenes in the tea, gently offset by the milk and sugar. each cup teethes through the slow banalities and anguishes of the days interrupting my ability to draw every last detail. i can feel the trail of embers all the way into my sinuses. the smell of the tea and the blossoms collapses into one smell, one memory, barely differentiable from the rest. the tea grows colder in my hands as the sun continues reclining into the horizon. i consider that i might be too close to tend to all the details properly.

i decide to cut myself out of the city at night and i find my way to get on the next departure with only minutes to spare. from the window next to my seat i can look up at the top of the hill and see the reservoir. the blossoms are too far to make heads or tails of beyond their candycane masses of rosy pale. i take the last sip of my tea as i feel the doors close and the wheels shudder into motion. dusk settles onto the shoulders of the city as we accelerate into the darkness. the conductor punches my ticket as the last of the daylight lapses into rest. before i know it, we’re a few miles past city limits. my sketchbook opens itself to a blank page, and i sketch pages and pages of blossoms from memory, shading each with care, until the tortillon disintegrates into my hands.

we make hay out of the light inside the cabin: reedy, aching culms of chartreuse rattling sympathetically with each bump and wending in the rails. my limbs on the left have gone awol again in a frustratingly and overly familiar loss of my sinister. this time, they have vanished from sight and are not merely non-responsive. i can’t see my wrist and knuckles despite the searing and swelling that renders them useless. the crystals lining the tunnel shimmer back through the window onto your tunic and catch in your necklace. a few beams find their way across your skin and mine, making nests and warrens along the way. they tickle my cheekbones and the bridge of my nose and you expectantly wait to see if a sneeze will be coaxed out of me.

that we are on this journey is nothing short of a miracle given my loss of the sinister becoming unremitting. last month i nearly sacrificed all my belongings as i ran through another station much like the one we departed from. i lost my footing on the cool marble of the staircase, fell forward, and my bag fell from my shoulder, over the balustrade, splitting open when it landed on the floor below. the clatter of nutshells reflected off the ground and the windows as they spilled forth through the threadbare duckcloth. all the other itinerants making their way to the trains below us circled their wagons of empathy. some travelers avoided any proximity, but those who didn’t remained unaware of the nutshells that split and crepitated under their feet.

you gaze along the edge of my eyelids as if to read me from the outside in. after averting my eyes, i glance back through despondent breaths. the last time i saw you was before the loss of my sinister, when you let me know how my left side was my best side. well before the words had even reached my ears i knew your fondness for that hand and wrist, watching it become swallowed by the depths of any vessel it found its way inside. my grief crackles off my lashes through the cabin and you hear my loss reeling out of me. you shift in your seat, searching for something without looking or using your hands. the corners of your eyes contract as we stay silent. i close my eyes as the hospitality of sunlight spreads across the back of my neck. as we drift into the countryside, i feel you grab and envelop my left hand. i wonder if i’m dreaming as the servos in my wrist and elbow whirr into position.

a leaf on its last twinge,
bereaved til the next year

a manicule: for word usage,
fantastical, perplexed gesture

a pointer toward storage,
lost among typed text here

for s.o.

slaking into mortar  
    clarifying to sweet  
    enrobing nixtamal
    engulfing the plaster

bury me, slowfire the
    lazy kiln, await my
    bones as kindling, for your  
    duty peals in cycles