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Or have I been worshiping suburban propane?
Is there something to touching the great muscle of a lip?
Will touching it repeatedly make me more money?
Am I at best my skin and its drapery?
Are you like me: just a generously cut feather?
Are you religious, and if not, do you subscribe to the Catholic aesthetic?
Do you trend in your dreams or do you redeem shares of light abstraction?
Have I forgotten how to live in the wrong part of my body?
Because of sickness, is there a deployment of rot in my heart?
And, is instant dewy glow my life’s sole plot point?
Did they tell you, too, that the writing of your emails is bleaching our reef line?
Did they tell you, too, if you are 37 you can only be something infertile?
Have you held your stomach like the 25,000 seeds in you are counterfeit?
Is our stock truly plummeting, or have we always been made of these great dusty aisles?
Is the entirety of living learning to disable comments?
Are essentials even essential, and is the term ‘everyday luxuries’ making us sicker?
Will larger breasts really give me something to live for?
That is—is it deviant to feel deviant when using sugar cubes not wrapped in paper?
Are silenced notifications making me an abandoned parking lot?
Could I really just be the imaginings of my extraordinary notes, someone’s saved photos?
Did you see the green-trimmed window and its sign crumbling?
What did it say in its passing?
Thank you? Closed?
Will return?
Sometime.
Did it feel like your face was in soft focus when you were looking?
And, did you begin to wonder then if there is even a near future?
Is it possible that you will cease when someone stops complimenting your soft lashes?
What is your current valuation model and how did you calculate it?
Did you include the hooped earrings, miracle balm, your body’s sporadic edges?
When did we start this drifting on the salve of our feed’s plurality?
When did a copy of a copy become a core memory?
Was it when someone revealed travertine is a moderately priced alternative to marble?
Was it when someone told me I would feel silkiest using snow mushroom?
Is it true that I keep buying and buying and still don’t own a lifestyle?
Did the world thank us for our service by parading us around its streets then buying us corked rifles?
Were the genuine human interactions promised as promised?
How did we come to be this close to common experience?
Was it the lush shoreline of our legs that led to our weekly earnings?
Or, did the curatorial department have to hold us together with pure gossamer?
Did they break through your eyelid with a hammer?
What, I wonder, did they find there?
A porcelain cup of knee bones?
A salt bed of microplastics?
Anchovy paste from Amazon?
And, do you think you could return the favor?
Could you one day touch
the cracked open of my eye?
June 24, 2022
I am carrying my breasts like two cold plums into summer, trying hard to be lightweight cotton like absence.
So what about the conjunction of planets over this field of asphalt.
So what about the fist-tight peonies absent in Kansas, the embryonic pull of memory.
They have declared the water of my body truant.
They have deemed my calves warping unacceptable.
There are burnt tongues of palm trees outside my window, and my voice is little more than a figure of speech.
It is something I have been breaking like crushed glass inside me—the pieces tumble out of another woman’s beautiful room.
Injured? We can help. A sign dots the causeway, and I scratch a lotto ticket into something esoteric.
I tell you I feel like disintegrating weather, follow even more people.
I am busy learning the most important part of me is accumulating photos.
All I want is the verbatim of orange blossoms.
The engine and its great heart fluttering.
I sleep, I wake, and a man in my feed writes why women should no longer use the word hanger. Tiny room. Overcast light. Existential thinking.
Without effort, I think plastic sex in the ocean.
I think cognitive therapy is the vocabulary of candles.
I think of product descriptors, recent likes, body mass index.
That I am a human in a body and now that my body is being told again to grow in favor of dependence.
Someone writes that I can have a toy to increase my impact sensitivity.
A curated collection that will help me to find my rhythm.
Is that what it means to be ongoing?
Scrolling feeds for original designs, premium quality.
Sometimes I wonder what it is like to disappear into a perfect example.
Vanishing, I know, is riding shotgun by the yellowed elders, fading like a brown lawn into deep summer.
It is somehow warmer now like loss is making a great effort in me.
On a walk I spy a headless baby Jesus in a rotted-out gazebo, and I decide waking dreams are futile.
That somebody is boring me.
There is the story of what is happening and then the story of what we think is happening.
Tonight, I will throw a napkin into a fire along the highway for the distinctive cracking, watching it curl into the shape of a dying woman.
Her long black hair a silvering tape pulled from a cassette after snagging.
Tomorrow, they say will be different.
Tomorrow, we can hurt ourselves precisely with the tulips.
IG: @steviebelchak
