Declination From Self to Self

by Jordana Solomon

a pecha kucha after Terrance Hayes

[DEMURE]

She still lives in the town we grew up in, with her girlfriend now, the one
with the abusive mother. We discuss this over lukewarm soup as the lady
brings our check. She does not mind the commute, thirty plus minutes
in a small red car to feel at the helm of something, the brazen, rusty divider
to the left and a few Canadian birds headed off with the gale.

[NEARLY]

Down a few states is the couple from the summer, a man and his penchant
for the swing of a hammer, a woman and her penchant for the man. I hear
they’re using river boats these days to get to work and then home, or maybe
it’s that they are building the boat for money and sleeping on the planks at night,
on becoming more like in with each bit assembled.

[TEMPER]

Last week the coyotes went rabid forcing school to close. This was so that children
did not end up bloody and crazed on the sidewalks, and so our mayor had time
to reassure the neighbors, who’d been buying up all the canned goods from the store.
When the last hound was eventually put down, they held a small service, invited everyone
on the street to pour a tin of tomatoes, the pavement going red with doltish worry.

[VESTIGE]

Everything looks bleak before spring sets in in the suburbs, everyone
is a cragged branch and the mailman can’t stop taking his coat on and off
and on and off. The blue bag that is a cradle to the paper sprung a leak this morning
so my headlines came out blurry. I am sure there is a sorrow in there somewhere.

[BOWED]

My small dog is dying. This is going to ruin my father. The resign of his subway
car nod, his round and peppering scalp, the moment twenty years back in Nicaragua
when he whispered about the revolution and ten women stopped to look, his obsession
with flashlights and a dwindling tolerance for spice. I cannot imagine the secrets between them.

[CROON]

A small while can be spent deciding where to throw the peach pit, but I don’t
want it gone forever. This could be my grandmother’s finger, her thumb,
wrinkled and sweet. She forgot to call me on my birthday like her house key,
so I wrap what’s left of the fruit in an old shirt and save it for the holidays.
She will know what it means.

[QUIET]

Every man in my family loves ties, and I’m thinking maybe this
is why I want to be one. A tie, that is, so close to the neck. The push and pull
of breath like something that is real or almost real, but never both. I read today
that schizophrenics can tickle themselves, the consequence when every touch
is foreign. Sometimes I want to kiss myself, right in the jugular.

[REVERENCE]

Depending on how hungry I am, I could eat a whole fish. This would include
its fins and various organs, the brine of the water, the brothers in embryo
who disappeared to Alaska, and each memory of myself at age seven. To sit and wait
for a thing that you know you’ll throw back, only a child would not call this patience.
It’s like at night, when you drink if you’re thirsty, or when you don’t, in the case that you’re not.

[ILK]

Sometimes it feels so holy to smell garlic, like we were made for this
and this alone. Similarly, I have taken on all my mother’s superstitions.
Collecting stones until they cover the house, finding a sibyl in the bird’s
flint beak. There are animals alive that can sense things in you
without knowing why, and then there are those that smell sadness.

[FISSURE]

Unaccustomed to the workings of an airplane, one could mistake their body
for a cockpit. A vessel of direction, always bounded, slightly sinister. It is not
as if we all haven’t wished it. In a dream I had occasionally last fall, there was a room
with thousands of levers, each one coated thinly in a layer of honey.

[JUNCTION]

They are painting the walls of my kitchen in the same color, only mixed
by different hands. This is where I cracked my chin open, here next to the oven,
I was riding my sister’s back. Of course she has never forgotten. Used to talk
to the disposal like, how’s it taste down there and to what in this house
have you been a witness.

[ELLIPSIS]

There is a desolate beauty in the underpass, so I cry. Historically speaking,
blue does not exist without a name, so I have started to say it, all the time. Blue
and blue and blue and blue and the second in the tunnel when the rain quiets
like blue and blue. If I was an architect I would talk, all the time.

[COMPRESS]

From what I gather, adobe is just another way to say sing to me, but in a very
low voice. My baby will never be half mine, half hers, so I make walls of clay
everywhere I go, control the light that gets in. Like score and slip, everything
by hand. There must be some parable for this life, however brown.

[STUPOR]

Time is all about the minute now. I know this when the man who fills up
my tank goes on to his second sigh, as he does, every day that I’ve known him.
I like to think whoever takes him at night does so unimaginably gently,
slim fingers unfastening his watch and the gasoline slowly pouring through the sheets.

[LONGING]

There are no cornfields where I’m from. Only moss and a knowledge
that the gutters lead straight to the river. Once, peeling hair from the neck
of a cob on the porch in early November, I considered the prospect
of gifting each kernel a spot in a singular grave. There are days now
and then when the thought of this seems to me my one greatest kindness.

[MURMUR]

The cello, even when plucked, is tuned in perfect fifths. And my parents
have started writing notes to each other. It’s a nocturne at the dinner table
with the timbre viscous between them. Put something on, she says,
so we can dance like crows who don’t know we are crows.

[REMOTE]

In moments of cursory doubt I seat myself in the freezer. Cold meats
and a fragment of chocolate, the place where the ice builds
its edges. I like the way my body can shiver and still remain noiseless,
as if it is posing a question. Like yesterday, my barber turned on the fan
and I asked if he thinks of me often.