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Waltzes with Morpheus

  For Leonard Cohen

On this day, when you beckon with your gates of ivory and horn your crepuscular crooning, unpacking lenticular dark-diction

Leonard, I’ve listened, I’ve opened my suitcase of honeycomb phosphenes they’re trapped in your timeline like child refugees between a razor wire Jungle & a suicide-blue sea

in Calais, a beast of the lens of present tense, takes Orpheus behind the bushes, poetry has swallowed a vane of osmosis

oh day, she is breaking and breaking   the moon is a sand dollar wafer your mouth, rock, paper and scissor the roadrunner, a Homeric gif

there’s a two hour wait to get to the solid gold toilet in MOMA silent emojis conquer Mount Fuji while the mouths of the buddhas lie broken

you burn your lonely tongue in the inferno of a hot-button hyphen psilocybin, or was it tequila? what was that word you sank in

to chase down each door of perception paint a lapis-blue fresco, and glue nostrum of a dream to windowless sky-tune you made love dance to

black widow spiders genuflect pirouette from the combs in your well tailored pockets but the angels on your shoulders now so cold and so homeless

saw you waving goodbye saw you ready to die and the last butterflies on your eyelids were singing

oubliette           oubliette oubliette

© Sophia Naz

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ODE TO MY LOVER’S BEDSHEETS (ode to my unresolved anger)

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Theory of multiple games (via text)

1. I say nothing. (1a: I say nothing and let the lions nose their way through the veldt.)(1b: I keep the silence in my mouth in my fingertips as an act of aggressive absence.)

2. I ask him to elaborate. (2a: I scroll and unscroll this bull in the china shop of my lungs. I eat soup and swear and wait, halfhere, for a different kind of nothing to never its way towards me.)

3. He speaks. (3a: I see he crest of his typing and it’s comically shudderstop. Somewhere, he is moving his fingers for me again.) (3b: I tell the boy I love how the one I’m speaking to chewed right through my current until I sparked like a dying livewire.)

4. I respond in time, careful, holding onto a still lake. (4a: I don’t want to be here. I want the big lazy cat in him; I want to stir like grass in his jungle.)

5. And so on. (We go on, tossing small stones and watching them roar and ripple.)

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30. phoenix

There are many destructions, love. Small and close, alien lipstick, adjacent anomaly, clenched fist. Forgetfulness, Friday after Friday, the world destroyed in its repetition. There are many more destructions love, the literalist litany, gone gone gone, the space between gone and left, and the world ‘taken’, translated, has dragged its chains through ragnarok and back. The moan of a trumpet in the morning, the grief at the eyeshut shudder of walls, the sky drifting down as light as a father, old, a child, older. A line reaching up and down, trying to make a building of a heartbeat.   Cruel machine love, cruel love alive, artificial reality, the negative imprint of fingerprint on finger. Losses. There are more destructions  than you could  dream, devise, design. The desert mind,  the world ending  in leaflawn women,  body and mind fully  divided. The world ends  in my hair,  in your  syrup tongue, in  those curved footprints. 

But don’t worry love. It’s so slow and full of fire and honey that we won’t notice  a thing. 

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29. matter

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28. colordream

She stains the world pink and the world reaches viney thin shoulders to tint the clique of planets nested here, planetoid dwarf as well as sun, light shuddering and shifting in a sifting spectrum, this kind of eye and that belly of brass, bronze rose and rolicking verdant blush, as if to say this one color has every shade in the heart of it, in that little spinning bumping core, this one thing will expand and explore and implode but oh she says it’ll be worth every moment.

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27. ssh

They saved the cave, cool skin dark, the dank drip, fire-shaped story. Their hand on a stick and the friction of flame. Days outside; taking apart the leaf and fruit snapping askew. They found Adam; he said, Lilith? she went that way. The she sounded like shh on his lips. Eve wrung their hands and sat on them. The tree was barely tangible; something taken from the shadows on the walls. Am I the idea of her? they asked. Adam didn’t answer against their soft waist, the veins through her skin slithering.

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25. red

You, and the earrings falling like autumn, like paper mache veins, tangents, the rivers only there to dry up, you and your teacup, pyrex, broken glass, your voice red, tasting like currants   afterwards. You. I couldn’t leave. We planted too many trees and they played in the yard like the children we tried to have, and crashed into the hollow of my chest. Instead, you left. You and your crimson tongue, and the broken glass staining my bare foot with tea.

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24. paper

[temporarily missing]

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23. ghosts

The birth of these metal ghosts. Creation. Weaving, the words we dance into. This is it: a screen with pinpricks for light and air. Your hands handing me a pile of writhing ideas. Your hands handing me my long fragile bones. This isn’t fair. Retroact, retract, dull the sharp sun. You’ve given me your eyes, shapes all around me so that I barely notice them. You’ve given me a painting with a wide generous mouth of me. The pattern of sun. The gleaming phone, the tugged breast. Our language has been uneven. My love, this world is held up on sticks and screens and keys. My love, this world is everything it should and shouldn’t be.

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22. the wave

[temporarily missing]

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21. son

Between cereal bites, I promised you cerebral mists and bridges of velvet green, and streams of brown spiders, alien, innocuous. Like a viney diaphragm your mind has grown around the stilled cars and thunder eyes, the dead boxes and keyboards. You made me a bracelet of keys, once, and so I wear out the letters-- to label, explore, eat wildflowers, name the animals anew. Few survived. Cockroach, ant, elk, and us. You are young for a guardian-- a gentle last remaining monster in a garden healing itself.

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20. porcupine

I won’t say your heart is full of coffins. To know this I would need to push the quill back through your stitches, and you gave me such a lovely gift, long and smooth, white and dark like a dappled feather. We drove through days, once, and melting hotels, and people we both knew from different angles. Disrespectful spectre. Do you remember the words I bit into you against the mirror as we turned in shadow orbit, that fluorescence, that gin? You read small print well, you were a small thing, a needle inside of a needle.

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19. photosynthesis

I am rinsing off asparagus, cold hard bodies, long, full of snaps, containing the unused green. The little trees boil, and I think of how art isn’t afraid of the shadow of atrophy. It keeps pushing, steaming, softening those of us who relish the heat. I drain, add honey. I can’t worry about the whole of the world and small parts at once. Some strong pepper, healing ginger, orange peel, silty shadows of dust from my fingers. This food will break apart inside of me. This is reliable. In these shells, people cut themselves away, lay their brains map-flat, jump around like eager little seeds. Let them, I say. It is the kindest thing to do. The trunks are shriveled, dark, hot. This is one night, nearly over, in a stirring forest of nights.

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18. big cat

Oh, for that green sick pulling the rubber band back, that snap, that quick sharp anything, lazy sprawl, big lion, remember what is it cats do with their food-- remember, stay away, keep the latitude and longitude honest, your side of the dotted line, your clump of earth, remember that these things rot, that he doesn’t care if your body decays

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17. summer

My heart is full of roads (unheard: that faint creak of world separated by plastic partition & did you know, said that strange warm rain, the dust will take in our melted fingerprints so everyone can see them as they pass at 65 miles per hour? Budding dear one, dusk on your tripping tongue, don’t ask around because you’ll find the flies under my fingernails, they’ll tell you I’m too hungry for sad songs, but it smells like water and wheels and fire here, the mud moving a rumble for music and let me tell you, I’ll eat straight through to the bone)                                and days have never been more jealous.