From “Flag”

Lately I am preoccupied with flimsy boats, the shape of them, and the fear I have of open water, which overwhelms me when I’m in it, always it’s cutting me somewhere in my lower half, that is, the ocean’s hard materials are cutting me at my heels, my ankles, my knees. Today I studied a photo of a precarious tent with thin cotton for cover, some sticks that might fall over, and the tent was incidental, the photo was of a man, he stood by the sea, smiling, the tent atop a flat rock and I thought of certain objects used to warn off thieves, their careful and flimsy arrangement, and I thought of the beach in Florida, buried wind, the impotence of some objects, I could have lived there, I do live there, in some sense, it’s one point of departure.


I would like to live usefully, present conditions fail that possibility, and I give way to capacity. My mother used to enter people with a camera, tiny and sterile, through the rectum or the throat. She’d see them, loop their flaws, they’d sit upright and thank her. Land. The gut came like tide.

My banner is a shawl, multifunctional as a towel and sack. I like to cloak myself in color, any color that would draw me, this contrasts with my previous insistence on neutral dress.


My friend a rose lake on an open boat set. Taking on memory, shade ebbs with time.


Oil top, dilute again, other extractions would yield a concrete or an absolute.


This morning, I watched water gather more water, speed toward shore, gather surface, rise, break on itself. I lived off a wave, my own.