Rachel the common name
and quietude the common noun
and lavender the common start
of good days.

I do not always look when it snows. I fear it will stop and the skies will open, paper-thin and blue, and leave me uncovered and cold without reason. Unfiltered sun strikes me hard, always on my neck, tucked in the joints of my fingers. I feel aware of my age—the sun rounded to four point five billion years old. I don't care about the age of the clouds. I'm told anyway that our water could be older than our star. I can enjoy their drift into material and immaterial imagination, flushing their bodies against the windows and onto the lawn. If I could see the spots changing on the sun, maybe I wouldn't fear aging in its way.

Like No One Came

October morning, first snow drifted
across the wood-grain window sills
on eastern walls. Ice coated tree limbs,
but the sky still felt watercolor.
A picture of summer in liquid amber.

There shouldn't have been snow;
the roads still lay in black bands
on their sides, waiting instead
for simple rain. But waves beat
like a dusk in the sunlight.

Now and then the breeze whipped
my skirt back and licked me
as a lover, circles in my thighs,
the small of my back, skin raised
in heated pleas of oh God and now here.

The ocean ached in a shuffle of limb
until it was too dark to move.
Too cold for October, for Sundays.
I pulled my hands from my tangled hair
and cupped the snow. It stuck
to my wet fingers and I had to open
my hands before it melted away.

Thrust toward summer's sky
with an oh God and you're here.
Winter made a sparrow in my eye
—numbed my hands and left me
stranded by the sea next morning.

"From Rachel, I learned the fine points of stars.
From everyone, I learned, again, that everything is important."
 —Raphael Dagold

“scraping out the stinger”


Satisfaction of gathering soundless nodes

ts – ts 

White birds in the sidewalk
Names after celestial bodies also, limbs, wood, spearheads

Potential earthquakes varying in magnitude

Vi-o-let

I colored in your lips, violet
like the blooms drifting across
the wide cumulous sky.
Like fingers that can’t catch
the violet-pearlescent buttons
down your belly. Sometimes
a violent violet pressed slowly
            into your thighs.

You were violet petals
 twisted into cloud and frozen
into violet ice crystals,
melted into his gaping
violet maw. Tugged into
his unseen violet stomach
and intestines, spit back out
onto your own skin again.

When you back away, violet
nails scraping the walls, tell him
I say hello. Taste violet words
and leave violet puddles to stain
the carpet where your violet lips
were pressed and held.
The clouds are so beautiful
rolling violet overhead.
Show him how much violet
there is in his blood too.

To Myself Who Loved a God (draft 1)

If I believed that angels licked
the corners of my book pages,
maybe I’d believe in divination
as a gradient of godliness.
            But you run away
            from your own words.

I wish I could find that god
you said knows. That she is
everything turning stars.

You stare into the sun,
but you tell yourself not
to watch your cornea burn.

You could walk, incarnate. A god
barefoot on concrete, toes
guttered with rainbow water,
            or oil-slicked blood.
It will spill from skies and lips.
            I know

how you feel about the water cycle.
Precipitation on your glass dries
            your lips. Not thirsty.
You lay outside in curves of desert sand.
            There’s a freedom in forgetting 
to drink, you murmur between the slope
of your hips and the dips of your neck,
where the droplets slide and dry
            before the sun can rise.

This sting is the slice of angel’s 
wing on my cheek, and it is just 
to lay where everyone lays, 
with the sun in their eyes,
            skyward by mouth.

Real Picture Thinkers

            I dreamed that the shadows were poltergeists. The shadows reach out and wrap their limbless limbs generata into themselves. There's darker darkness, almost red, reeling in their chests. They didn't move except their mouths, but then they convinced children to roll glass bottles and remote controls across the floor. When my parents saw my younger sister roll a wine bottle from the closet to his hands, they didn't hear the voice, and they didn't see her moving except to grab it in the end. When she was old enough to talk about it, she couldn’t remember ever moving the bottle with her mind. But I saw it, disembodied.
            When I woke, I wasn't afraid of the dark. I was afraid of the voices claiming to be timeless and the noses poking out of the corners. The medial cleft nudging into and out of the light. I remembered that I made the shadow real. I had hunched my shoulders in the corner and bent my neck down to birth a shadow from my chest with the white walls. White palms open and obliged by leaning against them and forgetting to turn out the light. The shadows weren't made of the house, they weren't in the foundation, they weren't out of the sunrise and sunset. They were a mutual agreement between body and light bulb.
            In that real room, my older brother had kept his collected rocks when he was young. Everyone collected rocks. The ones that would look a beautiful ruddy red in the water, but dry to the same gray-brown of all the others plucked out. Everyone keeps them in boxes under their bed or in their closet, or the ones still tinged pink or orange on their windowsills. They were beautiful once, under the algae and liquid sun. Sometimes they pull down the cartoon-pasted cardboard and take the rocks to the bathroom sink, to rub them red for a few minutes again, leaving them in muddy water on the counter to dry and go back into the dark. Heavy treasure collections. When my brother moved out, he took his rocks with him. I found more boxes, rubbing down the dust in his closet, heavy with gray rocks, light with black volcanic obsidian and scoria.
            Scoria—once a hotter red than I could ever imagine touching, air trapped inside to make it feel light as styrofoam peanuts. There would always be shadows inside there, unless crushed to dust and lain out supplicant inside a cube of light. There are only no shadows for a light source, and these shadows would still be so minute to almost not exist, but even knowing they were microscopically there pulled my eyes away from environment and into them again. The bubbles were so small they overwhelmingly nauseated me as much as, in theory, fascinated me. Trypophobia: fear of tiny holes that could kill us if we saw them poking through skin. The shadow of my nose on my cheek when I turned was another source of anxiety. When I was young I spent hours worrying that one eye saw my nose dark and one eye saw it light. One eye saw more red and one eye saw more blue. I didn’t worry when I looked into the sun, eyes open or closed, a light so white it blended to the blue sky or veins so red they pushed through to the optic nerve. And there in my dream I knelt down to touch noses with a shadow. There I bent and cradled a shadow in and into my gut like I was lava hardening with itching skin.
            Whenever I imagine shadow—true shadow, where we still believe light is somewhere to cast it instead of simple abandoned lightless spaces—there are red pyramids and blue spheres polishing each other brighter and brighter. They can’t talk and their bodies don’t make friction, but I imagine backing toward the light before I turn away, out of the room, and try not to think about my nose or its pores or the fact that I can only see my eyes firsthand if I take one out first.


Inspired by a classmate's Soma(tic) creation—Shadow-Watcher.