The first thing to spill today was the morning’s coffee: unraveled from the sheets that fill the nooks and crannies of this new double bed, it fell from the mold of a mug’s grasp to the flatness pressed between gravity and open space. To sleep on your stomach is healthier, I hear, to lift your spine to cold night air on the offering of your lungs’ insistence that they are alive. A lifelong side-sleeper, I am letting my limbs crawl into the corners that this square mattress offers. Twin rectangle dimensions have always asked me to fill them in with the lumps of my flesh; I find myself falling flat into this new life now where I spilled the milk from my cereal onto the floor quickly after the coffee incident. This goddamn breakfast is in my bed, it is on the floor, in the grout, in the pores of a sponge, (later) kissing the cold spoon against my lips, it is in my stomach. To French kiss is to fill cavities, to let the heavy muscle of your speech crawl outside of its own cave into the stalactites and mites of waiting teeth. This French bed has but one visitor, small and lost in its space. Why, I wonder, have I crawled away from America into these jaws of abroad, but to fill air with the bragging undertones of past experience (perhaps while pressing spine into the warmth of a stomach, my lungs keeping tempo with life stacked one on top of the other, like always)? I bookended today with a dinner of spilled rice all across the kitchen floor, newly cleaned. Packed so close together just a moment ago, they look so small when they are unraveled as a collection of ones nestled across these nooks and crannies.

they call me a pig with my snout married to marred mud made of the corn that midwestern soil toiled over to turn dirt to gold to turn over to the fattening act of making pigs. like you, like the others, like we all squeal about the shit found in the mud called home, the shit which leaked into this mire from the corn that made the feed that fed the fattening that made ourselves: it is all but a cycle; i have seen your likes before, like an archetype, like a cliché, like a history, like a present, like the chicken-coop mesh walls you build around men when calling them animals to watch from the other side, using your two legs as a tower above that snout called other, this is not me, this is an animal farm, this is a poetry, let the parables swath you up in the white veil of the bride who wears her virginity brilliantly on the color of her sleeve edging on the cliff that begs for falling. i have never seen beyond a pig pen, i have never picked an ear of corn from a field or an apple from an orchard, i suckle what falls from any human hand that forgets that its purpose is to hold until i can take my rest from eating and lay down on your table, next to the corn, my dried snout holding, itself, the curved edges of some crisply-picked apple.

A yawn is a gasp A yawn is a grasp- ing to steal the life of the street to pour back into lung A yawn is a yank that y’all misunderstood, sitting there on brick meant for walking Ass to street, my foot to step Your gaze longing, I did not want to inhale your words or fall into your grasping want as my breath threw me forward into narrowed streets through the confinement of rib cage Like the hold vous avez volé à moi when you ask for me to lay Coucher, You say, Avec toi. Bed me to a mattress square. This yawn cannot inflate enough. I cannot stretch myself like latex for the air needed to slip my body out of slackened grasp up up up up up up off into that hulled bowl turned upside down on this city to keep our scurries to and fro boxed in by the skeletal bars of a rib cage or the hairied knuckles of the masculine clasp.

My dove in the clefts of the rock,/in the hiding places on the mountainside,/show me your face,/let me hear your voice;/for your voice is sweet,/and your face is lovely. Song of Solomon 2:14 The French apartment that the pidgin fell into was already a museum of sound and sight when he painted its clutter in frantic gray streaks and hummed his music of soft panic by beating air into the gasps of his human audience. He seemed so peaceful in his bringing outside in. A pidgin and a dove are nothing but language, nothing but choosing French or German, wild and domestic nothing but perspectives on control, columbidae is but nomenclature meant to umbrella two words in between the choice of one or the other. I would imagine Columbus to be the namesake for the term, his story one of seeing wild and seeking domestic: he understood so well how asserting ownership can ease the transition from unknown to imagined familiarity. The English woman whose name I cannot remember wanted to keep the pidgin for a pet. Since leaving England for France, she has missed her garden pet menagerie (something like nineteen in total) that this one-room apartment could never hold. One small window may offer a tunnel between the sky and the body heat of enclosed human space, but a tumble in is just a momentary leap before the gravity of an eviction out. Today, this bird is no dove. Invading another’s space not a peaceful act: this is France, pigeon a French word, just like art just like music and perform melody, harmony, rhythm. This language that feels caught between a stone in the throat and the swoosh of its whisper out gave the English in this room— who speak with potato mouths— words to dance their fingers along the necks of the guitars hanging on the walls. The French invented photography, giving this English couple the power to make the world stand still with their cameras sitting on the shelves. It is all a choice of wording, it is all a harnessing of sight it is all a control of sound, this act called creation. The pidgin originated in cliff rocks before man moved into its home and sealed the earth in pavement built to serve bread crumbs to birds just before setting our children loose on their flocks to drive them away, like a catching from the kitchen to throw back out the window: My dear columbidae, please, show me your face. let me hear your voice its sound so sweet, its owner so lovely.

You sit me in front of the school where I work and tell me to count down till midnight when its security lights will turn off. Inside, there are boarding school students waiting to creep into the night’s covers, like those laid across the mattress of some princess who is remembering that crowns are but costumes for the head for the skull for the gutters of a brain. Your hands have had a busy night, I’ve noticed, crawling through barbed wire to pick roses not for me, but to stuff into the cracks of street light polls in between the roll of a cigarette, its caress of your mouth, its drowning of your lungs, while I stand at an arm’s length away (hands themselves making up this measure for distancing). Watch for lights out and you can spot the glow of the end of contraband cigarettes in the framing of a darkened window. There, that window in one portraits two ends, two, like us, ending in ten fingers meeting to make twenty. The painting of us is an inversion of theirs, two dark figures held tight against the yellowed pool of street-light gazing up at a painting in fire made against a shadow, two adults falling into the unknown of the other while considering the confidence of the youths upstairs. You say that when you went here, people would take blankets into the corners of the amphitheater and give blowjobs in light’s retreat, while I lead you up to lay your hands to rest in my room for the night. In the morning, where did you find time between yanking the sun up and dying its glow with early-morning smoke to hide sugar cubes in the dark of my dresser as a reminder meant to burn through the early morning haze that my goodbye kiss threw you into?

The last time I had a hang over this bad must have been six months ago in Portland. When the summer camp counselors gathered together in that beautiful craftsman home to hang socks on each other like wintertime Christmas trees under the blanket of a slow summer’s night in the thick of the year, and I woke up under the dining table with a stack of poetry journals for a pillow, face to face with a couple spooning against the china. But poetry is more column than cuddle, a stack of sentences divided, apart, one atop the other instead of hooked up side by side. A book is but a stack of pages bound together for strength. A year is just a pile of days. A tree a collection of rings chasing renewal’s possibilities one year at a time. Forests an anthology of trunks dizzying themselves with growing fat round and round and around again the past until man presses them skinny again to stamp their faces with his poetry. and all I see on Paris’s face are circles, an agglomeration of arrondissements pirouetting around each other to make a city in Spirograph, one that is perfect for stumbling through, overjoyed by the lightest of snows while the minute and second hand circle around the watch’s face toward midnight to divide one day from the next in this business of making new, to say then and there. Here and now. Those were socks and this is snow.