My professor told me to play wildly
and let my words travel. Now
I see rabbit holes everywhere and
all my language has bags packed
sitting at the front door with a jacket.
I’ve developed an obsession
with unabridged, rambling, disordered lists:
Groceries, to-dos, reasons
I am enamored with the curves of your fingerprints,
funny names for my favorite color.
Tomatoes, oil change,
they ebb and flow into each other effortlessly,
like you and me, cheese puffs,
the single olive in your mother’s martini.
Sometimes separately but sometimes
all mixed together, gin with a twist,
sometimes shaken and sometimes stirred;
Basic phrases I’ve learned in Italian, things
my apartment is still missing, my
top ten dead people, artists, movies
that made me cry whatever the opposite
of crocodile tears is.
Vincent and Claude, of course,
a shelf for the pantry, my grandfather.
In bocca al lupo.
Fold the laundry that’s been waiting,
wrinkling all week.
Bananas and almond butter.
Aspetti qualcuno?
Hippopotamus rain during the one where
she goes to Café de Flore after Will dies.
They left the most intricate, oily tracks
all over my most vital organ.
Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash
