Dearest Envy,
I cannot help but believe that this window is more real than me. Not even a reflection, but light bouncing in its particles and waves ignoring me. How convincing this is true. I find this most disturbing the way to survive conversations of ourselves.
An encounter I saw today.
A squirrel with a stump for a fourth leg. It did not seem bothered by this emptying.
If only it could be captured on film.
Let Us Reach Upon These Silent Stories Of Night
So much like that film, the one in the language neither of us spoke. A cartoon of two mallards in a frozen pond surround by a city. I commented on how their quacks turned to screams. You were drawn to their fierce flapping, feathers beating into slicks of oil. We never learned how they arrived. Perhaps an earlier story before we were born. You remarked how it should have taken longer for them to die. I said it was pacing to keep the emotion real.
Dearest Tapeworm,
This is how I explain hunger—a longing to be filled. I empty out all that seems valuable: the feel of a body caught in shade and sun, a voice of a parent unknown, the origins in broken bones. How better a way to say that there is a feasting occurring inside, then that which is voided around me. Here is where hiding cannot occur anymore.
If A Place Is Undiscovered Should It Remain
It was easier to discover Atlantis when we dreamt. Conversing in the symbolism and analogies of dreams. So much of us is lost in language and the sputtering attempts to understand it. Awake we wished to understand, perhaps together.
Silence is like a letter unwritten.
Traces and puzzles left about the bedroom, on mirrors visible only in steam, bundled with trash stains on napkins too specific to be chance. The crude caricatures of meaning and cartography.
So let it be viewed like a story.
These patterns form and turn petrified and sage. Do we even believe anymore?
Chris Caruso earned MFA’s in Creative Writing from Boise State University and Rutgers University Newark. His poems appear in online and print journals. He’s lived in several states and just moved back to New Jersey after seven years in Boise, ID. Chris hopes to eventually live in a small cottage with a koi pond in Oregon.