Santa Prudencia

In a bikini on the bed the body heaved and then let go--
truths come one by one, punctual as weakened batteries.

It's not going to be enough, this siesta. There is an absence
in the present tense. An active missing

that runs constantly throughout the actions
we don't do.

Going out to see how the sky
would lean into me, after I had

forced such forgetting of it, painting it
in diagrams. Here. A water-colored soul.

The money that you carry could never make you
what you are. The absences that I paint out

in purple washes are just me becoming.
Without a face sometimes I think you forced the sky.

Our lives, our matching body temperatures, are absolute in flickering.
Our lives briefer than prayer candles, seven day flames.

Factotum

Mostly apart some sometimes together
we are evolving, ringside and tongue-bound
across seas full of paramecium that squirm pooling into
bays choked with rotting sneakers and inedible aqua fauna
though walls vibrating with neighborly clash
inside steel, engineered in japan, made in mexico
immigrated from russia, kicked out of ireland
fact maps and your mothers acid trips
lit crit and my fathers' propensity to never
shut up, everything our grandparents drank
every unlived fantasy our parents surrendered
landfills of diapers we shat into now covered in silt
toxicity I breathe into you because you love
my breathing if perhaps not always the way
that I breathe