1. She reads him Gramsci with his meat. He chews and sighs as she carries on about things that matter; Americanism, the question of sex, Malaparte: where there is freedom there is no state. “If you’re looking for eros in the text, he’s not your guy…” She then washes his feet and brushes his hair, “You were always there, somewhere beside me, all the more in your absence.” His head fell to one side of the tub, revealing his profile and something more. Some shadow of self which lives that much closer to truth. His nose became a jib. He’ll never drown, he was a ship. She began to scrub his arms working against what traps him in webs. 

2. Each morning I bring him a warm glass of milk and a towel. I dip the towel into the milk, ring it, and put it flat against his chest. His burns are no better than before. “You are so cold. The air is so thin…” 
“I slept well” 
“Did you have another dream? Did you have it with her?” 
“No.” 

3. I wasn’t afraid. This was my first mistake. Totalized by la noirceur du lait. To love is to lose, no, to love is to love to lose. To love is to abandon oneself by abandoning another. Your desires falsify mine. Those who live totally are living for others. But this is so embedded in being a woman, we have contorted living for others into a living for self, which is the only way we were allowed to live for the self. Through husbands and children. 

4. I dwelled in his gulp. I envied that little grub of tissue at the curve of his throat that tickled the unwitting him. That could nourish or choke by mere reflex. Cul du bouche. 

5. He was disgusted by their closeness. Their sheer proximity only manifested a noticeable lack of it. He felt further away than ever before. Love turned into making a monument out of compensation. 

6. Displaced hunger sits in the chest and tickles the spinal cord with signals. The brain turns suggestible and the body rump. I eat to celebrate a life never lived but there is no food to satisfy. I drink to soothe my throat but there is no water to quench. There are no rivers in Babylon. Feverish hands relieve my discontent and with sobered stomach Hunger returns to its temple of false promises. 

7. There are questions such as one’s goal in life or one’s wish for an ideal life. Well, I say, I’d like to live without recognizing it and that’s enough. 

8. We are at sea in this ocean of air. 

9. The moth rests on a lamp and thinks of itself as the sun. He’d like to wake up as a plant, entrenched and blind, he’d see everything. 

10. I decided to eat alone. And this turned out to be the most sociable act I’ve agreed myself to. In eating alone I was eating with everyone. Commensality. 

11. I made a God out of you. In a little room with one chair, one image, and one window providing a bolt of light. I made a God out of you. He’s everywhere they say, but we worship him here. How violent we are to him. How unjust our idealizations are. The maker and taker of children. The author and terrorist of pleasure. How imperious, in my own imposterhood, my play acting god, I decide your outlines and shadows. I betray myself when your design rears its undefinable essence and commits a kind of regicide. Yes, you. You have killed my king. 

12. We fear the sea because it is a material reality of the psyche. Although so oblivious of the mind’s tides they resurge embodied in a base form. Thalassa, thalassa! 

13. I made a cathedral out of your image when you left, I search with the fervor of churchgoers… 

14. 

Dear Sinead, 

I’m afraid the minute I approach that golden thread of clarity I beat myself back into oblivion.
You see, I wait for him, yes, I wait for him. But, I fail to realise he resides in the waiting. When I am
with him he turns into a couch–not even! Just a chair that I might rest my books on, or light a
candle–and then forget the candle which greases the wood in wax. He becomes…the most terrible thing,
an afterthought… 

I bought more books today, not that I need them. Although now that I have them, I rest assured
that I definitely do not need them. I bought them to be certain of their absence. I know their words are
not mine, and their author is not in those pages of fallen timber. And further, that they will stay on
my shelf as some memento mori, the purchase of their absence growing each day. Do we have things
more in our dispossession? Is it in yearning that we have all we could ever want? I have yet to find
someone who gets something and feels that they still ‘have it’. But then again, what is having in a
world of landlords? My hands are gripped by air. 

Sinead, I hope you are well… yes I ramble but in my ramblings I remember how you looked last
time we met. Skin greened as if by time, you were resting near a tree, at the roots, like moses washing
feet. I’ll wash your feet, come, come, I’ll wash your hair. Let's watch the whispered lovemaking of
lichens and rocks. 

— Dolly 

15. Central and catalytic or peripheral and intermittent

16. We neglect the intricacy of fox holes. One inverted tower in the low valley. Celestial bodies suspended like tongue red plums. Top heavy and mocking gravity. There ought to be something divine holding it up, there has to be. 

17. I am calmer this time. Accepting, plentiful, domesticated. Hardly at one, but nevertheless okay with disparity. Okay with heaviness; of the half full glass. 

18. Are you hiding in some gray t-shirt? He painted the walls with wax. He stole the wax from the bees, their harbors of honey. Now each day the room melts a little, it unbecomes a little. Each day, a world, a word, is revealed. The wax gives birth to a word. There is a poem on the wall if you look. 

19. I needed squid. G would be over for dinner, and I needed to make pasta. Squid pasta. There’s an old estate nearby, Miramare, the husband named it for his Spanish wife, Esmerelda. Carrying the child of her lover’s she walked out on the dock and drowned herself in the river. I thought of Esmerelda; the baby, the squid. The bursting of blood vessels, the pointillism of petechiae. They retrieved her body and she looked like a painting. Each plate turned into a wake of the sea. I was a cod. The saintliest of fishes because it gave everything of itself and required nothing in return. 

20. In this old house painted in rain, unborn children and yesterday’s afternoon of sweet, small, and barely breathing death…We forget how heavy with beginnings the ends are. She leaves before anything has ever really started. 

21. When I said the cat was black I really meant it. The black cat lives in a green house. Real estate is the art of hide and seek. Could I be anyone but a cat? Alive in the dark, suspicious of light because it mocks the dark in its shadow. 

22. I want to wear long scarves. I want you to be my long scarf. My heater, my rope. I want to wear red; violent screaming incontinent red. I want you to be red. Surrounding me and lining each tendon. The pavement for each desire. If I look like a raccoon it's only because I subsist on the unfinished. We’re all racoons at heart. Our existence is one of perpetual jettison, a project of trespass. Thrown nature. Birth the very first foreclosure. 

23. I would read him a book nightly with nothing but the doughy light of the moon. In a room there was a telephone and a blue balloon and a picture of– a cat resting on the moon. And there were three pink shrimp resting on chairs, unawares, each stool was a fish tank, empty but replete with despair. And a jewelry box with a blue ballerina, and a white fox. And a spoon and comb and a bottle of dreams undone. And a little man on a big chair writing down the songs of the sun. 

24. Little boy, in this broken english and full body, I carry away your life. In this pink silk of your harborage, I squander it. Your body and blood are incontrovertibly mine, imperceptibly yours. Baby, sweet baby. It's alright, your beginning ends in amber. 

25. 

Dear Sinead, 

We built a house that no one could live in. In this architect’s folly we held each other. He left before I could understand… I left before I became him. We died with our masks on. Each morning is cold and abortive. I move myself out of bed and step into this glass sleeve I’ve made for myself. I’ve kept everything the same since he last was here and although it makes matters worse, they are bad in the best way. He left a trail of ash from the door to the kitchen and I’ve turned crossing this ash, to get from the stairs to the study, into a sacrament. I’m stealing glances at it now, in fact, lovingly. He existed for me. He exists. And perhaps that should be enough. 

I take things so deeply sometimes it's hard to believe they were ever really there at all. Sometimes I even question if you’re real. Of course, you’re real. But it's difficult to acknowledge someone’s realness and their humanity too without confounding oneself. And I think being human, or worse, being treated as one, is perhaps one of the worst fates to have. I’d rather be a wild dog, claimless, free, and barking mad (perhaps we’ve already satisfied the mad part). 

You see, I want to live in a way that barely holds me up. I want to find the very last thread of existence and sleep on it. I want a light fluttering heart and a stomach that has learned to make gazpacho out of its own acid. It pains me to live with a future that haunts me more than the past. Anticipation is simply too poor a word. No matter how eagerly I grasp and pull, no matter how many wishes are fulfilled, I will never reach fulfillment. I cannot carry this child to term. I’m tired… 

– Dolly 

26. A certain set of hands moved against the soft drama of flesh and shadows. Could you love this unholy fish in a tower of sand. 

27. Bataille’s fruit. I envy the inviolate pink of figs. Plush and roseate purity is the bastard of sex and death. Is love like a syconium? Pointed inward, hidden, and orphaned. Before you realize you have it, you’ve had it already. I tripped on a crack in the sidewalk. There was a crack in the sidewalk, a void kept together by cement. Take a look at all that asphalt holding together nothing. Even cracks are held. 

28. “Perhaps, the most selfless act is self-annihilation, and yet it is the most selfish when attempting to reach it through another.”

29. They moved with the luxury of clouds. With her aerie of sarcasm and self abnegation trespassed against, she felt counterfeit… She was one of them, its blatency made it that much more arresting. Everything is a mirror if one looks.