For Renaldo Arenas

Now I am a child-knot:

I open my head,

and free prodigious strivings and writhings of sand-colored thirst,

they are bashful and run for her skirt

- the balooned mesh with which she wipes rain from my head

and beaded morsels of my own skin

I am younger still:

a fetal cloud arisen from neighboring sounds:

the wet gush of a summer fuck that feels cool,

and then warm

and then cool

and then loud

I am not with you,

and the earth is not a perfect orb,

though she spins...

as the pelts of fauna limp after their feet,

dizzied by miraculous jagged beams of liquid light

that tease away the curtains of their skin,

we are young and knowing as we blush with prayer

A Slender Distance From Where Shared Time Began

The house stood unassuming, yet abashed in its display of caution. Stark red spread thick on aging panels – shrubs carved to match their peers within a rolladex of shapely lawns. The owners fed me chocolate and cinnamon gum when we went to their door.

I can feel air rushing by in torrents as I aspirate the motion of my wheels by screaming like a banshee; it is my way of bending gender at a prepubescent age for the sake of peeling paint; it is my way of releasing future phantoms.

Now the house goes whizzing by while I think of my mother's son fading fast around the corner of our aging home. Years past, this bicycle was his. The morning he was struck, the summer sun massaged us through the leaves and wet the corners of my eyes and mouth, like a dry wind turned wet and hopeful.

Later, he learned to drink and draw blood from nimble fingers, cry while coming and eat chocolate from a lover's hand.

One day his patterns will refurface a slender distance from where shared time began.

Muybridge Horse

For legs now grip the air, four legs that crunch down on glistening white dust, then rise again to meet the echo of their clopping, as snow sometimes makes a sound in its descent. A dry whinny against air and whirling hooves that would levitate with Muybridge in brittle stop-frame. Now, horse and rider tumble down a hill slick with fresh powder, matting fur against the icy velvet luge of autumn straw. Tail beating against time, flank pins rider to the earth, mashing her cheek against the frost.

Hand flails to face to meet the gush as morning light infects the dream. Breeze from the open window upsets the room in rythmic gusts, casting her hair across her pillowcase in a crosshatching of streams. For an instant, this pattern exactly matches that of the lattice surrounding her bedroom door, itself a mere replica of Gothic ivy. Then it is tossed back across her face, where she lays a trembling forefinger, still searching for a trace of blood.

Beyond the wall, the adjacent room holds no trembling young girls or boys, no furniture at all. Months before, when the room contained nurses, a body and a bed - sunlight bleached the latticework around the door pale earthern brown. Even now, she hears the slither of those vines coiling around the knob – but it is locked, and will remain so until she returns to the Muybridge horse, half-frozen to her wall, floating through the air while resting safely beneath a pane of non-reflective glass.