Diary Entry #28: Ars Poetica

I start where I am most afraid: an addiction to beauty

is a place to keep a loss. My father liked to sing love songs, his lips

elongating each vowel, his tongue breaking the center

of everything, and he—so tender to the sound it birthed.

I’m listening to jazz in the park again, crying

in rooms that don’t belong to me. It’s true—

the wrong music can be damaging and every photograph

is an elegy. I practice posing in bathroom stalls to feel

effortless. All flowers want to be looked at, and chasing the moon

is a chronic condition. How can I translate where my finger

lands into language? In conversation, I drop a little French

like a baby out the window. On TV, anyone can be dead

and look like art. A long life is avant-garde—I place mine

on the open shelf, on the edge.