that day at noon

That day at noon,

the music stopped; 

you could hear nothing 

but the tinkling of screws 

falling loose from her head

(the road was mundane as it 

often is and the blazing heat 

of a memory was all blue

everywhere).

She 

grew wings and

opened the hood.

She left – 

(This painting was wrong. 

The peering concluded that 

it was missing a truth.

It forgot the human dream)

she left him –

That day at noon,

when thighs pressed against

cold lines

of girls, watching the game,

she imagined that an armed man

could appear on the bleachers'

side, shedding the scene

into an experiment of a

story, that he would steer,

she guessed, away.

(She theorized that binary

gender was designed with

her belittlement in mind.)

"A boy is a gun," she thought.

"A boy is a boy," she corrected

her thought. Then there was

American silence.

She murmurs in the

culling of raindrops:

"good shape" and "needs

fixing" and "drinking water".

But the seas are made of words

and the words are made of 

people. 

She was born before flesh

would be ruled by silicon;

her clammy hands still

sift through grains of

moments behind the glasses,

touching the glasses to write codes,

and for a while she is a god,

but she will return to the dirt;

she is tethered by the gun.

So for a while she is a human.

She left the nebulous

consumers,

the rows of copiers and

gears and cars

and grapes and weight-scales

of sickly whiteness; she left

obligations to her practice

and obligations to society;

she left him.

She writes to-do lists on

a slashed painting

she seeks deadlines for

her poems to grasp at

a visible version of

her: the “girl” “artist”.

Still, the deadline system 

has given sufficient time 

for all 

to come to their terms 

with the end.

The journey was the right

length to tug at

with collapsed arms.

At last

she made peace with the electric play;

the eggy cosmos careened into

& imploded her bones.