The only airport departures are nurses, indeed, the goblin blue shirts are departing from the secure rear of the terminal.  Not to return or noting returning to the line.  The airport is frozen, freezing, free of people waiting in lines for cold water.  The lines around her eyes speak to me.  We will be needing vodka to wash my hands to take her hands in mine and warm them from the caster oil.  I can not free her from the ethanol.  The vodka is not as pure as what is inside her, vodka is not dehydrated.  Vodka is cold is well known.  I had not known I would do this, like this, washing down with the substance that is causing her hands to be cold.  Dropping my pursed fingers into a pair of shot glasses, see how it would have to be vodka?  I would be pouring the remaining cold and drying the skin even colder then.  My hands are cold and colder as the vodka evaporates.  I think about a baked potato.  Today is a baked potato and a bad peripheral neuropathy day.  The term from the cold land of oncology is peripheral neuropathy, though I think the bartender inside will not understand that we are ugly bags of mostly water and salts.  I worry that she does not drink water, not nearly enough water is not enough for the nearly identical sharks inside her. 






Painting white roses, I photoshopped a chicken to make her look not sick.  I photographed and photoshopped a rhode island red to make her feathers more red, more crimson, more vermillion than rust.  I had to make her more red and drums.  More vermillion meaning more light that I was using the light to hide her inside neon red.  Then is red and golden.  I do not want to be the golden next generation.  The grand henwife thinks the golden hen is the most beautiful, her feathers are the fire in sapphire.  The rhode island red is sapphire hard.  I do not want to be the golden next generation through and through and I have not driven through rhode island in the new year.  Why did the chicken cross the road?  To get through to the termite, the great bright termite in Christmas lights.  Light and meat might be maybe the boundary.  I am dreaming of dark and sticks and I had to draw on the boundary and I had to draw all the sticks that fall in between illness and health.  I had to fade to where the boundary was feathers only half falling from her body.  I had been dreaming that outside of the dream time it has been happening that she has been darkening and has been keeping her dark feathers to herself.  She would be dark and sticks these days.






Cold is also frost.  Winter is also wet things held in the head the dream is cold in the morning.  Stalactite dripping to drip.  A drop.  A Stalagmite is the dream in the morning cold.  She is the difference between dripping to drip and a drop that has been dropped down.  Related to hang the head.  Straw fedora to turquoise under-hat to off-white from drama.  Straw from the farm.  The opposite of dripping is straw from the summer.  Straw of strew is to lay flat and not to be confused with hay with the longing vowel.  Dry stalks the cold after and afterwards.  Bale or bundle held in twine, dried straw presents a fire hazard as it would.  If someone dried and polished straw long enough, then it would feel like this sweater.  I wore this sweater the day it was warm enough to walk outside.  I forgot to worry about the water boiler.  If I worry over the boiler enough, I might find the right thing to say.  I wore this sweater the day before the dream and it was dry.  If I worry over her pipes freezing enough, I might find the right thing to say.  All I have is saying the right thing, right like straw polished and polished and the third is not given. 






Julia Rose Lewis is the author of Phenomenology of the Feral (Knives Forks and Spoons Press 2017).  James Miller and she co-authored Strays (Haverthorn 2017).  She has published the pamphlets Zeroing Event (Zarf Poetry 2016), Exhalation Halves Lambda (Finishing Line Press 2017), How to Hypnotize a Lobster (Fathom Books 2018), Archeology and the Beast (Luminous Press 2018), and Miscellaneous (Sampson Low 2019).

Photograph of performance by Leif Holmstrand.