VI KHI NAO

YOUR DRESS IS A SWEATING DAFFODIL
Outside, the air is heavy as droplets of coruscating
water swimming through a bowl of eggnog. Suddenly
the sound of something from the interior periphery
pulls me back in. Is it the sound of the microwave beeping
or is it you telling me how you seductively requested my address
a day or two ago that leaves me feeling like I am submerged
in linen? Even though
landmines are not children of Covid, you are quick to tell
me that the heavy smoke from the fire is only
smoke and could equally be the other side of something,
a country where the yellow light falls on broad green
leaves and the walkways are made of weeping concrete.
Your yellow dress is like a sweating daffodil, the dampness
on your brow, where strands of hair get stuck. If you were the
bathhouse and I was the linen we could both be the eloquent
things that kitchen sinks are made of: floating water, restless
foam, disembodied utensils. Our home is silent. And, sits
like an old woman chewing betel nuts while gazing far near a
Panda Chrome poet and whispering, "When you are
no longer driftwood soaked in poseidon blood, I want to
make love to you near a papaya tree." And, I think your left
cheek is chalky like you rubbed your face in the foam
around the mountain’s jowls and now you’ve come back
down and I wonder was I with you? Did you miss me? The
sky has asked for its vapor back and your eyes, with
your head against a pillowless bed, are gazing past me at
something looming on the ceiling. And I wonder
whether you’re in love with San Francisco’s canola
bars? Are you pregnant with powdered strawberries?
Will you kiss my left eyelid before you brush the coconut
water off your book’s spine? Or tell your tongue that it
has ached my avocado-smittened saliva all morning? When
I wake, your breath is a million light years away. The light
falls on where you often fall in the seven days that made
up the religion of collarbones flanked by a forest of trees or wrists
deep in soapy dish water.
With you embedded in my arms, the persimmon tree at our
nearby Airbnb seems less lonely and less forlorn.
Its fruits so verdant, the kind of green that made you think
of the colors a CEO would finalize for sleeping
bags. Our bodies are trying not to be Styrofoam with one
another, leaning without buoyancy and without being
able to decompose each other in the feverish embrace. I have

been torn not like a page out of a book while you pressed
your face deeper into my neck. But, I am torn, my agony resides in the policy–
The connection clears its throat, drowns your voice in
static, and a distant siren threads the silence.
Your lips move but your mouth is
soundless. My mind finishes a sentence yours began. This time
my chest tightens and
I wait for you. I want to understand how
you are torn. I flip through your book, listless
& waiting for you, but the page I want
is gone: a bumble bee crowning a glorious nest of
wheat, your hands hanging limp between your knees, the damp
hair on your temple like splintered twigs or a teacup’s tiny fracture.
If I could turn my armpits into mittens, I’d slip your hands in
them, because your hands are strong and delicate and break
nothing but themselves and sit like queens at the
ends of your wrists. I’d make my arms into thrones
and my armpits into red and gold flesh cushions. Or how
my cunt waits like a china hutch, where the plates are
wide and long and decorated with wet paint pigments crushed
morosely by a watercolor dancer and a few cucumbers. The night is
soft like a quiet breakfast without a sweater over it or an engine with
its tongue tucked inside its skirt. I kiss you lavishly, one cheekbone
at a time. Our kitchen door opens widely. Its bruised lips are red
with rubyish radiance. There is clarity in its creaking.
It’s whispering remember when…in another city you grew
faint and fell down. I grazed the back of your hand.
In Louisiana, you held my cracked umbrella and your hands
were sure though you are not the sort to keep a door when
the hinges break, or if a dish chips to simply let it stay that way.
Even the tips of your fingers stay focused around the rim of
your teacup with a wedge of lemon and the steam
rising up. Your eyes were placid and under my blouse the sun
rose and set and dusk fell through the window and over the
table and your fork was poised over your plate. So I wring my
heart into the basin of our bed and twist my leg around you
like a corkscrew rush. In the early morning, before the light
meets all the other lights, you’ll shake my heart out, 
and watch the molecules of my desire bite the tongue 
of your photons.The dense neurons of my caress radiating
beneath you, beneath the limelight of these remote charged electrons.
I am positive our love is nuclear energy, invisible only to those
who are blind and congenital. I am positive that to touch
you, from afar, in my sleep is no criminal enterprise. Even if
history blindfolds itself with the anachronistic
handkerchief of myth, I still want to press you into the muddy

wall and the mulberry bushes. Here the tree’s mottled shadows
press their backs against the buildings and hold their breath.
There is no breeze, only heat and the sound of a lawnmower’s
engine advancing and retreating. Midday clouds bow low to the treetops,
and the branches twist and ball the shade into their fists. In
the evening, your speech is soft and sleepy, like sunken stones and
floating driftwood, gathered one by one, and exquisitely arranged
in the faint and final spurts of a menstruating sun.   
Your barred
teeth nail me to the mast of another night’s sinking
ship, which I had not thought would sink so quickly, I held
your head between my hands and down we went. I woke
in the red dawn of another day. Our blue shadows
beneath the lamplight. The bus panting like a dog, dying,
and whining as its maw shifts from rigid to slack and a
handful of tired men with rumpled shirts and dirty
backpacks walked past and I cupped the base of your skull
like a cracked vase and pressed your heart so hard to mine I
could not tell whose heart beat so hard against my chest. The
bus coughed black clouds into the lungs of this, my catatonic
city, then, quickly, too quickly, the street cleared its
throat and left me at the entrance of the empty day, waving.
SEU VESTIDO [E] UM NARCISO SUADO (SEGUNDA ESTROFE)

Com você fundido aos meus braços, o caquizeiro em nosso
Airbnb parece menos solitário e menos abandonado.
Suas frutas verdejantes, o tipo de verde que te fez pensar
nas cores que um CEO finalizaria para sacos de
dormir. Os nossos corpos tentam não ser Isopor entre
si, dobrando-se sem flutuarem e sem serem
capazes de se decompor no abraço febril. Eu fui
arrancada não como uma página de um livro enquanto você apertava
a cara em meu pescoço. Mas arranco-me, a minha agonia reside na política –
A conexão limpa a agraganta, afoga a sua voz
estática, e uma sirene distante pisa o silêncio.
Seus lábios se movem mas a sua boca é
muda. Minha mente acaba uma frase que a sua começou. Dessa vez
meu peito aperta e
te espero. Eu quero entender como
você foi arrancado. Folheio o teu livro, apressada
& esperando por você, mas a página que eu quero
se foi: uma abelha coroa o ninho glorioso do
trigo, suas mãos pendem mancam entre os seus joelhos, o úmido
cabelo em sua têmpora parece galhos rotos ou a mínima fratura de uma xícara.
Se eu pudesse transformar as minhas axilas em luvas, eu enfiaria nelas suas
mãos, porque as suas mãos são fortes e delicadas e quebram
nada além de si mesmas e sentam qual rainhas no final
dos teus pulsos. Eu transformaria meus braços em tronos
e as minhas axilas em almofadas de carna rubras, áureas. Ou como

a minha boceta espera como porcelana, onde os pratos são
largos e longos e decorados com pigmentos de tinta molhada amassados
morosamente por um dançarino de aquarela e alguns pepinos. A noite é
tenra como um desjejum macio sem suéter ou motor com
sua língua enfiada à saia. Eu te beijo com luxúria, uma bochecha
de cada vez. Nossa porta da cozinha se escancara. Seus lábios túmidos são rubros
de rúbea radiância. Há claridade em seu ranger.
Ele murmura “lembra-se de quando”… você cresceu em outra urbe
fraca e abatida. Ruminei as costas da sua mão.
Em Louisiana, você segurou meu guarda-chuva partido e suas mãos
tinham certeza ainda que você não fosse do tipo que ficasse à porta quando
as maçanetas quebram, ou se um prato quebra para que você o deixe estar.
Mesmo as pontas dos seus dedos ficam concentradas pela borda
de sua xícara com raspas de limão e vapor
que sobe. Seus olhos plácidos sob a minha blusa o sol
nasceu e pôs-se e deu-se o crepúsculo pela janela e sobre
a mesa e seu garfo estava sobre o prato. Então eu meto o
coração no estado da nossa cama e torço a pena em torno
como o perfurar do saca-rolhas. De manhã, antes da luz
encontrar as outras luzes, você me arranca o coração
e vê as moléculas do meu desejo morder a língua
de seus fótons. Os neurônios densos do meu afago radiantes
por debaixo, debaixo da ribalta desses eléctrons remotos carregados.
Sei que nosso amor é energia nuclear, invisível só àqueles
que são cegos e congênitos. Sei que para te
tocar, de longe, no meu sono não é empreitada criminosa. Mesmo se
a história se venda com o anacrônico
guardanapo mítico, eu ainda quero que te apertar no muro
enlameado e nos arbustos de mirtilos. Aqui as sombras amontoadas da árvore
apertam suas costas contra os prédios e seguram a respiração.
Não há briza, só calor e som de motor
de um cortador de grama indo e vindo. As nuvens do meio-dia inclinam-se às copas,
e os galhos reviram e contorcem a sombra nos seus punhos. De
manhã, a sua fala é mole e sonolenta, como pedras náufragas e
tábuas flutuantes, juntas uma a uma, e curiosamente organizadas
nos esguichos últimos e lúgubres de um sol que menstrua.