T r a c y F u a d —

BODY OF WATER 2

And how that spring it took so long to start a thing and then so long to end it

In the peaks and troughs of the market

And the supermarket 

Where events that passed suggested that I might not really be there

Blocks of salted cheese kept disappearing from my cart

And when I thought that I was saying whole I was saying instead pieces

When I spoke with friends it was with distance and I heard their cities’ sirens

When I woke it took place on the coordinate of a graph

And everywhere I went cement was being poured

Pumped up to a great height and then funneled back to earth.

Trash blew past me as I sat beside the flooded trench, a very long body of water

Infants passed, swaddled to the bodies of their mothers, so as to appear like growths

As if, in a certain state of loneliness, some bodies had simply begun to bud 

I silenced my phone

I willed myself ill

When I unmuted myself, a goldenrod box appeared and framed me

But still I found I couldn’t speak

Tho when the bells rang, I wanted, too, a rhythm

I wanted to ring with my own sound, to permeate space

I watched as the light licked itself out until we were at the nadir

When inevitably the point began again to climb, but in increments of mere minutes

All year I imagined conversing with the parents of the children I watched for money

Whose long flat looked out above the flooded trench I loved

Whose uncle one afternoon watched me in silence

Then spoke to suggest that I purchase insurance

Protecting me from liability in case of harming others

Whether deliberate or unintended

Earlier the child had slid into the intersection and nearly missed a car that sped against the signal

Provoking a chorus of gasping

What is the word, again, I ask into the window

The blur between safe and sure and certain

It is explained to me that there are two of everything: two zoos; two airports; two operas

I, too, come from a twinned city, two cities which grew to form one

Though I guess it’s not the same, merging and being bisected

Outside the birds chirp like dial-up modems

Neon moss the color of the willow tree on the canal wall

A pair turn away from me and face the wall till I pass

What is loose flaps in the wind and I wear my sweaters backwards

I notice I sleep with my head always turned to the left

I notice I hold my breath when I run

Everywhere I go I see the strip of bricks denoting the wall whose absence is my age exactly

Its state of non-existence the most permanent of states

The silent night alight with flashing neon collars on the necks of dogs

A dot bleeds through the paper

That the pages might correspond with each other

Surface to surface, or uniquely bound by hyperlink

Though the screen seems to grow when it shows nothing at all, a will to overtake my field

Each day I recombined seven letters to make known words, an addiction to distraction

Each day I wore a sign of starker urgency

The still life begins to abscond itself

To self-disassemble and flee

In the gallery, a beating of the rising ocean

A punishment for mutability, susceptibility to change

The figs rise up, lifted by a flock of grapes

The string was strained and then soured 

What good is empathy if it dead-ends in flesh

My dot over a steep ridge in the wound of the evening

The forest filled with figures bent over bags and basket, gathering wild leeks with fever

A lack of synchronicity, even as our bodies make shapes which rhyme 

My dot between two trees, alongside the kidney-shaped body of water 

And on the bridge two children selling seed bombs

Balls of earth to throw at earth to make things grow