WANTS

Another love story folded inside a pillbox
Another day of amorphous need

How each side fought itself in the dark by accident
And I am better now: moving

My arms in an aim to be
As persistent as the clothespins

Spinning like aerialists on the line
(I notice more the spoiled pallor of things)

And here your gloves curled like real hands
On the highest shelf of the closet

Unattainable and sodden
They’ve retained no scent at all

Off the television a near-sacred woman
Bleating little sermons in verse

Everything seems so peopled

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NEWS FROM ELSEWHERE

Outside, the eyes of the doe are ticking
A funeral song plays for our single mind

And last night I dreamed you were home
Reading a book on imaginary beings
While the web of human hair still clung
To the shower door

I am visiting the pool these days
Where my remarkable smell lingers
Despite the moisture
And I felt a man’s heat in the water

Is it you again
Inviting me to touch others to feel you

The sad giants continue to walk
Me home at dawn
You know they follow me

Everywhere as I move through
This grief with luminous constancy

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Because we are so multi-rooted, because we are from everywhere, we are no longer really from a place. Instead, we are from beings. Saint-Exupéry noted, "We come from our childhoods as we come from a country." But what is childhood if not the moment in which we experience some of the strongest social bonds of our lifetime? For all of our nomadic existence, our roots today are as people based as they are placed based. We belong to beings as we belong to a country. "Wants" and "News From Elsewhere" explore the muscle memory of one of those rooting bonds, when the you has gone and the I has remained.