On northwest winds—and the scent will find your nose like nothing else. When it meets with you, it is not quite like the charred umami marking on the map a neighbor’s midday Sunday, some holiday in their mind and tending to the grill. Every moment that the former’s smoke persists, made thicker on a somewhat humid April morning in Atlanta, it is nothing short of a veil. It is not so much in the air as it is the air. Not so much contingency as atmosphere. It touches us without consent. It works into our lungs, yes, but also into our sense of space—and our memory. We remember that the world around us is capable of burning. That the world itself invites the flames in in response to negligence. That’s what a drought is. A withholding occurs. The empty handed, then, reacts.

7 A.M.’s dressed in midnight’s clothes. The year has changed, gotten older and I, I too. And you, sitting across the table from me; up too early yet well rested, the rest of the day waiting for one or both of us to sigh. “It’s a comfortable one,” one of us will say. Forming the words taking more effort than the lifting of our eyes towards what this world is, is becoming, became in the dead of night two nights ago. Yearly war zones reborn in neighbors’ backyards. Pyrotechnics testing the hearts of dogs and cats, that one old man fighting for sleep beneath the overpass. “It’s too early for music,” I want to say. Heartbeats beneath my hoodie disagree. A look across the table at downturned eyes kickstarts a symphony.

I’m late to writing today but at least am writing again. What distinguishes writing and not writing is a gnawing just above my navel; no more than the afterthought of birds disappearing into holly hedges; the dirt-slow truancy of falling leaves. I’m caught up with classes I can’t seem to wall off from my thoughts. A day without work feels like rest less than theft and though I’m yet to fully love feeding the bag my fingers itch. Propaganda works like this. Our daylight is taken from us and yet we blame ourselves for not carrying the difference. Our assignments suffer, hearts, stuttering, stuffed into modules, left accosting dust: the taxes on abandoned rooms. Some are made to starve and given judgment for the shape of their descent. We all live with our amputations. Not that we must, or trust the why of it; but we often do.

I want us each to ask what am I to do with this extra hour that isn’t living our way towards dying? (For me, it’s being loved, loving, writing, but it’s surprising just how much escapes you if you focus on the rhythm in a sleeping dog’s breaths, the comfortable sigh across the room, the victor of a compromise with a sweetened tooth.)

5:41 A.M.:—morning, a southern somewhere; this somewhere’s dew-warm air, swelling with tea olive, Carolina jessamine, viburnum; the dog’s low rasp unraveling as she relieves herself beneath a rambling rose, dead leaves keeping down the spatter, layers cramped and crackling, less so in this hour’s dampness; this owl now at the southern edge, now a freight train’s song it sings its song behind (above?), the fraying digits of cirrus clouds; a star or a planet testing its opacity, the tri-star handle of Ursa Major pokes out the purpled veil; the dog passes me for a second trip and this (and each) time I step beside a patch of mud for a buried, dead wood thrush, buried exactly where I found it, at the edge of a half-felled fig—I am imagining it burrowing free and flying away and not feeding the mites and worms and beetles and mycorrhizae, imagining it atop of the roofline or the hedgerows, newly hacked—more of the neighborhood and sky a telescoping neck away—, the asphalt at this hour, dulled by interstate, in a state of lull; only the sound of city air before wheels commute their hostages, carry their sentences, commas the needles of their execution, remains; only city air holding the thrush on high for one more day, this day that winter turns into a winter’s night—and its own grave.

I’ve been here and there. Mostly here. Taken by shrinking rooms. Growing flowers. Zero need for bandwidth, the width of a silver wedding band. A willful arrhythmia.

I’ve been taken by the desire to write about this world only when not descending into skin that, when taut, touts some sense of authority in its regard, harboring a preference for staying the pen, for the lightness of silence in its stead that meets my eyes in the blur and periphery of a largely satisfied irrelevance.

I’ve been taken by the small, the sliver, the shave of weight which, taken from our backs’ collective stone, looks like something we might call relief. Taken by my smallness, the silhouette of a crevice in the firmament.

I’ve been taken by the sober tightness of my husband’s arms, and him, my own; the hours and their aging teeth, loosening atomic bonds between us like morsels that can’t be savored beyond the point they no longer leave their names against the tongue.

I’ve been given to a loved attention on the ticking clock, the battery in its back flagging, the third hand’s chock offbeat with the sinus of a nodding dog.

I’ve been given to grief—statewide, stateside, online. Laryngitic at the keyboard, circling the void. Notebooks were unadorned prisons. And still, I stayed uninvited. I fell out of love with the sound of my own screams. Fell out of favor with the first-person. Flavored the preterite in worry for a friend that held a razor up to death. Just below the lung.

Every I in this sentence is missing ten fingers. Is a contingency. Every inch condemns influence, damning dreams of a plastered pedestal never needed nor ever needling to be nourished.

Others make better soothsayers. Others, with their stamina, handier paladins. Others still—sycophants of the preexistent knell. Call me, or don’t, instead, for compassion, for camellias. Should you seek someone unwilling to run but willed to blot themself into red clay. Until, one day, they’ll say where we’ve been—where we are—is everywhere.

Two mornings back, you and I got married in the middle of a storm. We married with the making of mud, to the music of gullies gathering the corners of uneven one-way streets. Outside the courthouse, there would be a world. The same world, given to a thin veneer, stripped of acridity, and so, one newly naked to an us.

When we met it, there was no shelter. Our shirts and jackets—soaked, our pants, how they stuck to us and glistened. We laughed windshield wiper smiles, skimmed denuded trees with beaded glasses. In those hours we accrued we had been given time to forget this city as a room of roaming, restless knives.

Every city became that other city. Our city. Those were our spatchcocked pamphlets flattened under wet black wheels reeling past black cop cars parked for free in metered spaces; our brutal buildings, sky-bridged and feeding upon people’s flesh; our halfway abandoned downtown square, a bombed-out barbershop, its slanted hilltop marble steps; our pockmarked sidewalks chock with blackened disks of flattened gum.

Two mornings in and the forsythia are late. The viburnum, metronomic; the heat of March, impatient. February is a misheard name. Red-winged blackbirds hold the conversation. Someone is sleeping still. Everything revolves, is spun from one condition to the next. All flowers follow their clocks, their alarms, and weeds, their slack itineraries. Some (of each) align with our own, some we will come to mistake their shapes for revelation. The city will remind us otherwise.

What it means to write about the year, the year passed by, in its displacement, that the year is displaced, years never escape us, we escape nothing but our attention of or towards them; to call them them is to regard them as figures, as fissures we jump, we leave behind, finding velocity in abandon, as if lobes, whichever ear, if not both, escape, un-rivet their attention. Their person, riveted to comfort, creatures who fill themselves with creature-ness, shunning the creature-ness of others, finding the creature in a bubble, updated photograph, updated profile, the same billion cells dying and refreshing and lying to every mirror in the name of comfort, a comfort that, its butterfly in capture, frames their lives on screens as idyllic. Flameless. Cool idyllic tundras, praise for its lowly vegetative state. The limits of vegetation there, the paucity of their investment. The soil is cold and hard. Roots are superficial. Taproots are terminal, or never, rather, know of reach, they do not know what reach is or what it is reaching establishes through contact, the contact here a positive coldness that presents itself as blameless, engaging bonfires only to toss the real beyond its recognition. Safe spaces, these tundras or taigas, these boxes, while bombs fall. While people beg to survive. While others bristle at the timbre and typing, the syllables of pleas, others lean into the missiles, their missiles, their silos, their problem of relativity. Our problems of proximity, of impotence, of performance, of the opacity of fingers in ears, of washed and drying palms over eyes, of cages around consciences. Selective winds to meet the charred. To write about the year is to write about what was seen, what was witnessed, is witnessed, is deemed acceptable, is or has or will possess an accepted width of this world’s wounds.

LIFTING MY HAND from the book I find a tiny fruit fly pressed into my hand. Under a loupe I see its fuzzy body froze forever, its beaded crystal eyes no longer glinting in peripherals, and now, just now, a second one appears, silences funeral for resurrection, throws resurrection into restless wings, sharing the particles of we, the years spent shed and spread through central heating, our alms, articulations, a steady ration of ethylene, so many bananas bound for imitating leopards, blackened panther-bound, plantains come home from cravings and forgotten, forged in falling, turned to neutron stars on the counter; a squash embossed, its bottom lost to mold seeming every hour to edge one foot beyond the waiting room of the world, ever-readying its green examination. How lucky we are, I tell the fly, for longer days, that it is the flesh of soft decaying things and not their skin that sustains us.

Purple clouds at 4 a.m., 5 a.m., 6—and the bedroom is aglow, the walls and floor made out of waking eyes, only just, only one adjusted slat of plastic blinds to see the purple clouds, adjusting blue-socked feet through rooms untouched by those clouds, black bathroom, hallway, kitchen, flicked-on light and quick across the measure of the glass door’s frame is purple, across being away, north by northwest, or northwest by west, that a rose compass somehow might be seen by this light, somehow answers How long has there been sleep? the sleep ratcheted by clocks in retrograde, the hour gained sees shadows rooted in the thickness of thickets, even as purple capitulates to blue, the blue moved over oak leaves exposing grackles in the trees, as if their palaver like a hundred grinding brakes was not enough to turn your ear, the blue gaining, blue silence broken by a single plane, blue minutes when no car has turned the corner, none bathed in blue and barreling downhill, always some place to go, to continue living or move towards death, the light still and not still, is, continues transforming, finds in light an alchemy of fragments, fines the dankness of damp leaves, files the dampened clawing interstate in air, and the blue, the blue reintroduces the city, the clock, its retrograde, the alchemy’s incessant grip, to roses, power lines, the growing cenotaphs of summer green.

There is one humming at the bottom of the hill. Two blowers tint the air buff brown, stain it acrid with the boast of gasoline. Two men saw at a mailbox crushed by a parcel truck.

There are still blanket flowers, zinnias, azaleas. Still there are buddleia blossoms, abelia. They are covered in the last of dew. In the dew to come. In a room with pine walls and an empty vase, a story stains the air again:

More than 400,000 children forcibly displaced in Lebanon.

400,000 flowers torn apart and scattered. The gardener is in a state of failure. The gardener is the failure.

Here, a single dark pink rose rises above the far west gate, the shrub’s remainder battered bare. I don’t know any of their names. How does one return and return to the flowers of one’s own space and not see the world? What is the calculus behind what makes us only see the flowers that do not burn?

How do you see this and not want to drown the world as rain?

Neighbor six steps from the hilltop crosses us mid-walk and yes, he is. Says I look like a young Bill Cosby and yes, he is. Says he has to listen to a talk later about women in education and doesn’t know what they have to teach him and yes, he is. We bite our tongues, bite each other’s tongues, taste each other’s red and walk away and yes, he is. The late Ama Ata Aidoo’s protagonist in Our Sister Killjoy called them the people with the color of “pickled pig parts.” 1955 is dead but he hasn’t managed to escape it. The Jurassic exists in retrospect, in textbooks, in museum bones and the bones of birds and yet he hasn’t come to clear the sphagnum from his toes and descend. Parachutes are expensive, power lines are everywhere and yet. He works as a tutor, others say, a former teacher. He’s missing several pages, the one with the lesson that neighbor is not a designation but a question devoured or spit out by the taste encounter leaves. Saturday’s abandoned cud at the corner for the pig who crossed our path was our answer.

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You could say I live near the upturned knuckle of a through street just north of the city center, off a major thoroughfare where the path of gathered rain from here to it would be labeled downwind, or that I live near an empty lot where an oak tree stood till the day it crushed the neighbor’s ranch-style house below, was then demolished and is now an empty foundation painted pale blue-gray, or that I live two blocks from train tracks whose south side marks the start of a narrow hiking trail/nature preserve, or four blocks from four gas stations in three blocks, framing in center a dry cleaner with a small gay bar on the building’s side, itself with a strip club on its side fully hidden from the half-dead-end—exit only halfway in—access road, all hid from a movie theater, flanked along its lot by a bank on a hill that changed its name three times in twenty years, itself opposite two buildings: one a former restaurant cum camera shop cum restaurant cum private pop-up administering vaccines now mostly concrete awning, the other a soon-to-be former restaurant, ninety degrees from a thrift store donation center OPENING SOON and having been so the last three years, two laundromats, two grocery stores, one supermercado, two bakeries—one Greek, a tire shop, a car wash on the corner, another diagonally across, a small Thai restaurant, a Greek restaurant which seems closed for weeks at a time, a two-floor, twelve unit apartment building in cream orange brick with thick cast iron stairs and thin railings, a Chinese family’s long-run fabric store—no pets allowed—next to a pet groomer whose building resembles the vet, an animal hospital that resembles a groomer, a garage that fixes mid-century European cars as long as European means German, a seller of fountains, craquelure vases, and outdoor sculpture (isn’t it all, eventually) of which some ageless Roman or Teutonic child, one toe to the base but otherwise tipped in varying states in flight, is a common theme, a pizzeria, a taqueria, public housing – the tallest building in the neighborhood, two doors down from a head shop, an Ethiopian restaurant, a community pharmacy next to a sex shop, two other sex shops next to one another, themselves next to, on one side, a Mediterranean restaurant so named because no one culture has more than two items, yielding a vague pointing towards a general but wide area involving three continents, and on the other side, an empty, dilapidated diner, itself next to an empty butter-colored brick facade, across from the automated car wash beside a furniture rental store in tinted glass, bookmarking the road with an empty furniture store, two antique shops which, like more shops of this kind, look more full each time one passes by, an old Greek barbershop floating near a corner, near seafood and mariscos and a nightclub very loosely resembling the Parthenon surrounded by barbed wire and a restaurant for pensioners pressed up to a two-floor motel with green doors which, at night, sometimes, beneath dim or flickering lights, are left slightly ajar. I would prefer to say that I live here with you.

6:33 a.m.:—phosphenes, a shuddering door, a dream as what was, as who had been, next to who is both here and still there, the shape of a kitten cutting a hole in an unlit room, steps across unseen womb sliding in slippers between bed and walls, the angular word eigengrau for what hue the eye can see in light’s complete negation, switch turned on revealing dead moth caught in sheet-web between bathroom window and screen, eastern screech-owl on power line disappearing after four hoots, two Carolina wrens sensing absence begin in blotting blue, dull scratch of jet engines, three in one minute; old truck engine in condominium carved into the hillside, motorcycle announcing the distance from a kitchen to Interstate 85, school bus on street’s apex turning right and further upward, more jets in southeast trajectory, another or one of the same wrens, more distant now, a different call, a webpage on phosphenes laying out causes matching symptoms of capitalism, small gray squirrel crawling across darker gray deck, small cat scurrying towards the sound of sudden feet in the back of the house, sound of water from bathroom sink competing with freight train two blocks away, silence between 8:12 and 8:13 a.m. broken by northern cardinal male on chain link fence, continued on neighbor’s wooden fence two feet away, the sound of feet and creaking hardwood, another jet, half empty mug of tepid tea with too much milk, someone asking “but what’s the opposite of eigengrau?” while making coffee—

7:02 a.m.: moths love an open kitchen door. The morning air is conspiratorial. Chlorine, bromine, only slightly purple clouds? Is it formaldehyde or a jar of pickles or a patch of sour earth remembering the storm or mats of mycorrhizae at a dead plant’s wake, riding along the dew?

The grain in capturing this light is heavy. Reads somewhere between carbon copy, tv screen, and indecision. Atlanta on another channel than its capillaries. Smudges pass for information on all communiqués. Unlikely and mostly safe and only vulnerable groups as if any lungs should second as plastic buckets full of glowing powders emptied into pools.

This morning is diagnostic. Pacing, itchy scalp, doppler heartbeats carving limbs on space. An ant crawls down the right edge of the screen. Two, now, perhaps the same ant, only flicked off and returned. Seems larger or I smaller or nothing else exists.

Ten a.m.: yet to see a chipmunk, bees, no more than one cardinal, male, and two squirrels. Moths maintain their routes. I have neither heard nor seen an unparked car. A single horn pinches the block. The airplanes, relentless.

I’m glad you left a message; sorry I missed your call. Any worry I have is perpendicular; swerves at the peripheral suggestions of birds. Returns at the thought of someone asleep three rooms away from me. Your someone in the same room in the ICU. Is a mirror pointed towards an empty corner both of us pretend we cannot see.