[arrhythmia]

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.