on the wake of my fall into abstraction, a body will be missing—
not its shape but its previously summoned math
the racemic transparency of a mechanical device
forced into the impossible symmetry of a ghost

i only go to bodies i wouldn’t mind to die beside
they’re road ends—
eerie books—
their spinal, hinged, swiveling accessibility to be polynomially open in half

been there for you—deloved—virid—crowfeathered—
dreams bitching up their way to the end of nights

waiting, wondering where in the frozen-by-moonlight, orthogonal, almost evaporated bedroom, the polyhedral spider will embellish her thorax with a starfish’s kimono

notches, wrinkles, cracks, lines, runes, an extravagant almanac of a serpentine grammar, an echo, a scent—(chemically) a ring—, an aura—others would say—, a detachment, blood drops on toenails, a disembowelment, a shedding, ointments, hairs, epithelials, bacteria, mites, a dissipation —warmth, for instance —carbon dioxide—, impressions, minutiae, imprints, the wave function’s mirror imagination, insect bites where tendons intersect, the kintsugi-repaired crushed bones of afterlove, a minor bruise, a violent landing, an inviting windowpane, an itching, the antithesis of glow, a faint scratch, a corollary, a sediment of methane and vitriol and unconscious calculations, a tongue encircled by the remembrance of a ligature, a shadow overlapping its own faint light, a collection, a square root
all of the above signs of having been,
none of the above awaits after sleep

patient zero in your plague night, cursed by the discipline of the worms—
my heart was weak, barely bloody enough to flood the flesh with war

awakening is the revenge of gravitation, optical inaction, drifting, a smashed tetrahedron, its perfect coral color, alluvial sediment, waterfalls being sucked up by basalt cliffs, a sparkle in an eyeless socket, clouded-down sheets like alcoholic succubi crushed against the floor dreaming infinitesimal obscenities after vomitig absence over dirty underwear

an omission of never having been is missing—
your enantiomorph naked in the mirror—
the pond spitting over narcissus’ eyes

no chances for the winterday to abridge itself in lichen—
dreams followed you to the sea of grass—
however, when one of the leaves falls,
the other one becomes meaningless—
and light was left unhinged

no words to be emeralded into death—
yet i wish the moon to be repeated
.punctuated
.crafted
like an insect, when using its claws to climb a petal, pierces a zipper trail over the perfect turgor of the lips,
like my own blood soaking your dirty feet up to the ankle bone,
or a dead spider’s forgotten web blowing a full lung,
pulsating an orgasm into the thinniest glass

 

 

Germán Sierra is the author of The Artifact (Inside the Castle, 2018), seven fiction books in Spanish, and many short interdispersed texts in both languages.

 

Image: Collage by Joan Pope