Warren Heiti

“Your voice, an eveningin late June, ice losingits edges in a jar of tea.”

“Your self is a cosmetic fiction, a centrifuge.”

“You are not a god, though you are hostileas a god, inhospitable and anonymousas a metropolis, your grey and single-minded industry transforming the shoreinto yourself. Narcissism is notself-love, but a mechanism of survival,your cogs churning amorphous as maggots,pallid as almonds, paper-whites, the highnotes of foam.”

“I stand there at the corner, known by the equinox and knowingnothing, exposed by the alethiclight of those apples,that fearless crocus,the magnolia tree, its chandelierof tears.”

“The iris of your fistconstricts.”

“Mute, I stumble through the dry, verdigris aqueducts of your eye, thinking this prayer, formic acid, ant spit and sandpaper: blink and I will be expelled, sharpen the edge of the water, subtract me from eternity.”

“The mind is moored to others;the wasps orbit on little tethers of light.”

“The taste of chalk. The sun lays its copper thumbs on my eyelids. The radio plays the monologue of a dog. What is the formula for tomorrow?”

“The handless clock trying to holdthe hour of death, saltin the last mouthful of water.The windows opaque with silence,silence stagnating in the wineglass.”

“The sky bruised my eyes with rain's weight and my body was a held breath.”