A moment of quiet is what it takes—a break in the conversation sitting in Dealy's living room in Peru, considering the mundane. There were four us, drinking pisco sour or light Peruvian beers, catching up—trading stories & being weird, relaxed—falling into the ease of old friendships, doubling Justine over in my silliness—she had the most to drink & when we looked at each other we could read other's thoughts, it brought us both to laughter. Puneet was tired, drinking his pisco straight to try the flavor while Alex played with his beer label. 

Even a couple days later it's hard to recall everything we talked about. What I do remember I'd like to keep between the four of us: Dealy, Puneet, Justine & myself. & thinking to the past, & then to the future it occurs to me that moments like these are a mortar, concrete & adhesive holding together big chunks of memories. The conversation, the stories, whatever made Justine & I giggle as Puneet shook his head—it'll all be lost, sunken eventually from our collective memory—& that's ok, better than that really—because it holds together our distinct bricks of recollection—it is the assurance of our friendship in silence, it's the slight smile that performs on our faces when we think back. 

Readings

For Alex & Marly excerpt

I will not try to understand. Our absence lies across the windowsill  
bedsheets imprinted on barnacled elbows
nourishing the famished affection like a drowning lawn.
Your cheeks are not grapefruits – 
they are soft & smooth, pulp-sweet without salt; eyelids still closing 
clamquick—sensitive to the touch of light.
I cannot read eyebrows any better than a caterpillar 
eyelashes locked like ribcage; funny 
how sometimes the most fragile pieces of us seem like bones. 

The turtles have fallen & the rain is still. Lick my jawline, I have not shaved. 


Fog Is The Sky Going Tin

I am ritualistically sacrificing pieces of myself all the time. 
My nerves are beginning to wreck me, I can no longer handle the coffee janky
& my tiny heart, it cannot support anything substantial or whole. Much less
the movement of the sun. 'What a shame, no more beer.'
Drank it all, regretted it. Wished it was back. Cannot save a thing. 
Only my healthy amount of self-loathing to propel me. 'It's not all bad', there is a twisting 
wonderful in foliage caught between reflecting back blue light & the shadows,
in eggplant cooked with proper stove heat – tasty squid clear, soft, green
& the moment before you convert into sleep & your mind begins to spill into the puddle gutter 
of unconscious & you begin recognize the moments amidst the timid confused always 
& your awful scowling reflection, when you are a beautiful & living thing.

Aztec Heart

Walking down Broadway with Justin in silence, drunk after too much whiskey
I had to restrain myself from talking about the orange of streetlights 
& how they'd swing our shadows around their feral halos on the cement. 
Watching him watch his feet fall on the sidewalk I wanted to put my arm 
around his shoulders & kiss him on the eyes as a reward for having absolutely no use for me. 
In front of our crooked house a dead cat is left in the gutter looking unnatural & the corpse 
of a palm tree remains.

We considered the cat as Justin took his phone out for a picture.
“We have to bury it,” he said. “We can't let the children see.”


Dead Cat & The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Bren & I are swinging our legs on a tree trunk, tossing loose chunks of bark into the bumping meadowgrass. Talking lazily about the future above a thousand upturned feet of wild daises, seed-heavy. They move in the wind with the styrofoam resistance of their stems as the soil swallows long shadows. Bren's eyes are full of night's blue, sewn on like a healing bruise; last night Mary Ann's sailor gasoline set its grip on us, we are all self-combusting things. In the nine hours of new light the surrounding landscape looks reincarnated. The flaming tongue of the sun out tasting the air, coiling around cypress fronds beyond the shadows of power lines that divide a face. Far from the push of fog & poisonous gas, though we are still being watched.

A hundred feet away Sam lights a cigarette. From the tree trunk we can see the meadow spill into a large slab of ocean, barely rippling into the distance until its hue matches the horizon's pale blue. Monarch butterflies roll in from the east, away from the lighthouse & sea, towards Bren until they are behind him. They flirt & fuck around his silhouette. He fails to notice, taking out a used dinner knife & slicing himself a piece of brie. The butterflies ooze, wait – hover. Two sailboats convulsing in the air as he crams the cheese into his mouth. Later, James & Megan join us on a clifftop deep within the palms of ice plants overlooking the sloshing blue glass juice, the bright purple blossoms spread out across the steep & eroding earth. James smiles & waves to us. He's holding Megan's hand & bringing beer.


Sunlight, On A Branch With Bren

i.
There are treasures in the morning that last until the late afternoon
as columns of dust in the background continue to draw 
slow to the left. Black crows try to blow the windows in. I cry great sea-troughs
as the rain picks up, for a while it hollows out the sky's fragile grey. The joy remains 
in the reflections on glass ceilings of puddles, heavy until they evaporate. 

ii.
The most modern way to affirm someone is to remind them that they are desired:
Seven people cuddling close & drinking coffee mixed with rye.
On the bed the different colored spools of hair elaborate their ears and faces
where I fell in love with each one & became determined to understand their features.

Tiny oases I recognize better, each time I return to them. 

Poems For An Afternoon Spent In Bed

i.
	Winter came & coaxed out the vague flowers seen along the riverbank, lavender. Today I sat down at the face of the San Lorenzo, watched the swallows loop & collide onto surface with a splash. The air rolling on heavy like wrinkles in rice paper as the river flowed beach bound at my feet. I slid by ghost-like, sun licked right through me. 

ii.
If I were to combine your blood, toes, & hair 
			it might not be you, but it would be enough to satisfy my basic desires.

iii.
Time spent around town with names in your mouth, crossing the wet 
streets being absorbed into the morning's atmosphere. 
While crows cozy in electric hammocks. I haven't made enough people uncomfortable 
at the supermarket. Whole slabs of human crazy 
tucked snug into wallpaper flesh – I feel like a baby 
being subjected to a giant polygraph machine. It's hard to be sentimental 
without developing a dark sense of humor. 

iv.
In the meadow the wild lupin are pulling themselves apart at their blue crowns spouting out cones manufactured & fringed with white ' dapples of blossom umbrella between long columns of grass toward sky ' the colors lifted amid the shadows slant with ozone puff ' When I grow up I want to watch grass move within the air's interludes: 

		(phenomena sealed away by the soil ' surface rippling 
								fallowed ' snakes coiled round 
  the blades intertwined in patterns ' feel the torque barrel 
			cross the mutilated lace of grass ' wind droning between the sleeves 

					flickered against the sun's delicate lacerations
                   only reaching the broiling dust ' strung out in discs wheeling heavy under breath) ' 

or I can become the fertilizer in your garden ' realize sense of purpose

v.
I listened to the changing dialects of the sea murmuring inside a shell.
Will you devour me when my reclining bones disturb your ears & skull? 
How many hours have you spent in bed? A sleepy golden storm layered with archways & leading towards neck – could I have kept you here while the lupins blanket four and a half miles away? I already know that affections cannot be hoarded, 
but when I sleep alone my knees grow cold. 
The tide of bedsheets encase our lives like a veil; & not sure to do with that moment under the skylight I
 started to peel away the film of my vision away – to see what kind of stream 
flowed underneath,
I never wanted the future to be my fault. 


Landscapes

The morning is bright with overripe pomegranates rotting on the tree – so clumpy, their red crowns cracking, while my mother makes french toast & I drink coffee. It's all a method of revival, the canyon stretches from windowsill to windowsill in a nice big grin – purple & green between the backyard & trees. My sister heats up tamales, I can smell them. 

A bird collides with a branch and bends it back – takes a quick peck at the red fruit's fold & flies off into the purple, green & blue. My mother returns to flipping the toast, golden with broken egg yoke while I make cinnamon sugar in a '2010 blackberry preserves' jar. Isn't it exciting to be alive when the sky is wide & the cold air clears through to your nostrils? I put cream in my coffee ritualistically. 

   
Someone says something boring about the Chargers. Someone says, shut up & grab some milk, but there's not enough. Benjamin will have to go door to door asking the neighbors, watching his feet take up a different space on a small segment of cement, never thinking of looking up & picking apart leaves or letting the shape of clouds into the space of his daydreams. He ignores everything behind his book, scratching at his lower lip. Isn't it exciting to be alive & wonderful & strange? 

The birds have moved on to the rotting apples as my mother applies the toast to each plate. Everyone is set into motion – wild blackberries with no regard for personal space. 

New Years Day 2011


LET'S NOT TALK

Sometimes let's be silent, the bones of this window are showing again
underneath the paint. The affection bled out, just like the passing months. 
We've searched under the mist & the earth trying to lose ourselves 
to something other than our hunger, letting our fragile skulls play 
underneath the drama of live oaks, the sun sank 
& tossed its remaining light into the cloud's translucent shrimp flesh –




the worst of us are sunsets, 
         
             weaving night reckless with head lights	
                                     blinking in and out of city streets 

						& linger there, waiting 
          until their point of breaking. 


Let's Not Talk


	My childhood was a heat haze of vision. 

Sight connected with the idea of sun 
light radiant grains of refracted colors & shapes that appeared more bright
	than the photos my family kept under glass displays; 
			faded & cool as if left now to simmer down into the film. 

It was one vibrant experience of bewilderment: 

	fish eyes following me when I went fishing
	hawks overhead in thermals restless, the
	crowns in the clouds towering
	& the wide set cusps of palm trees through sunglasses – foliage 	
	showering down reckless 
	with leaves reaching out to clench the waves of sun 
	suspended above the asphalt, 
	& me in the backseat of the car watching
							blurs in the distance, ripples in water. 




			The heat haze still lingers  
	in fixtures of thought clung to by 
constantly drawing.

Somehow I misunderstood the shardglass halo I had imagined on grandmother when I was three
with the three circular forms that constituted the sketch’s skeleton of an elephant –  her own stain glass radiance hindered 
				by my lack of understanding 
							of how halos actually work. 

I was too preoccupied with function
a fascination with the mode of production.


	Now I realize that mental internalization is still poetry without any physical rendition
 beauty found within an interior beholder;
I've been working on my vision (as a) in-a-sense.
	I want to reach the gentle spark of spectacle,
learn to be softer & smile more. Though silent, I wouldn't carry it like myself & generation; apathetic, but instead regenerative 
			in the motion of doodling, like a reflexive smile of understanding. 
 
& even if I'm constantly forgetting:

each tree has more of a demeanor than I could ever remember, 
each empty space of paper is open to everything, just like each breath of fresh air
raising your head just above the water line, the imprint fading
in a spiraling fever, a precious delirium following 
the subtle wrinkles that tickle above the pavement, flirting 
with the sunlicked moisture & a saltlicked face 
							this heat haze 
		moving in & out of me.

Heat Haze

I'm going to be loading poetry on here, cuz otherwise this is a waste of space (though whether or not my poetry is a waste of space is up for debate) anyhow, if you're looking for good music check out Turtle Turnip because I've heard those guys are real real nice. Upstanding citizens & decent cooks. 

Zak Abramson