pull tight

1) Bill sent me home with a box of cake from Veniero’s Pasticceria on 11th Street
2) I tried to convince Carla to take one of the slices, “no it's tied with string,” she
said at first, “I don’t even really like sweets,” she said next
3) I failed to convince her, not knowing her well enough to know how hard to push
4) I enjoyed the privilege of cutting in front of the queue at the zine fair
5) The ego, that perennial source of shame
6) I have a face, the ego seems to say, daily
7) I fill it with cake, with cum, with commas. I am trying to fill it with commitment,
which seems not to be my nature. Then I think I’ve been wrong about my nature,
wholesale
8) Are we, in this life, to push against our natures, or go into them with as much
depth as we can bear?
9) Would doubling down on my sort of masculine waifishness please god?
10) Or is it better to struggle against the impulse to live like a leaf blown into water,
letting anything thrash me this way and that way and taking it?
11) Which would require a more traditional masculinity; thrusting myself into the
seam of each cracking day, with impressive calves that harbor a quiet threat

1) My edges were made of pigeons’ stretched out wings
2) I was entirely penetrable
3) Calling it bravery except if I could have I might have chosen cowardice
4) The orange tone came and went like accents on the train
5) I set up everything wrong for the evening, saw faces from my past, imagined
them smiling at me and found it helpful
6) Hillary stayed with me on the phone for hours, Demo too
7) Jumi prepared to do something I wanted to change her mind about, and wanted
her to change my mind about, and found, with some horror, my mind was maybe
already bent towards hers a little
8) Betraying the part of me that moves with sewing machine precision, admittedly
ungraceful
9) Risking a chance at direct sun, water flooding lungs, ordinary pleasure, swiping
hair from The Other’s face

1) Cranes still in the sky, a heavy chain cranks not at all for the afternoon
2) Am I swaying still?
3) A baby’s eyes are sometimes just like the fathers
4) Are these things I want, suddenly?
5) Meaning more lasting than the watercolor cups I used to probe a paintbrush into?
6) When people say having kids is selfish I think they often really mean having kids
is a shortcut to flattening out the creases of the begging afternoon
7) Should we not permit ourselves shortcuts?
8) Guilt residues on every windowsill along with long perished flies, is what Anna
means by “the obligated life,” the one we risk moving out of in order to really live
9) Should I stop recalling laughing with you in my mouth hardly?
10) Would that be a greater risk, than forgetting?
11) “Risk” in this turning is twofold & opposite; the risk of losing something you need.
The risk of losing something you need to lose to gain what you need even more
12) I want simply to be in the service of even more life
13) I thought of deludingly, craning my neck for another line

1) I did not notice my face slackening like mesh worn into afternoon heat
2) But bus placards offered unfriendly confirmation
3) More tabs were added to the task list by trembling hands only Hillary has held
into stillness
4) Benji’s birds nest veiled me from what I am only afforded to press between my
palms so briefly
5) Say it plainly Eirik says to Lucien and Lucien says to Sunday with an open
question
6) I promise to never again use nature to make up for my underdeveloped
spirituality, I read some version of, and pasted to my wall as a threat
7) My mom loves this long song
8) Like a bass line, you can't always know what a presence is doing for you until it
cuts out
9) Not unlike the hurricane cutting out the lights, Facile running out the backdoor
after a potent line
10) I hollered after him, barefooted, I recall
11) Please, please don't put that on the bright marquee