Our bodies, still as brackets, nested beside one another, lacking coherence or emphasis. The stop sign cannot speak to the yield. They lack commonality beyond composition. You wake when the sun crosses the seventeenth floorboard, as you wake every morning.
This arrangement affords me an object of study. You theorize our differences linguistically, biologically, taxonomically. I fold towels in an absolute and eternal reality. You separate and classify: dinner. dish. hand. bath. tea. Coordinated, inviting to visitors.
Over eggs, I study the rules for forming inadmissible sentences — what is and is not acceptable to the compiler (complier) — and ponder the dramatic effect of placing my orange juice between your plate and the chipped butter dish.
I am adjective that you characterize as noun, washing the plates counterclockwise at the sink. Our dialectic possibilities are not unlimited. You say theories of denotation I say extension, naming truth. You say grammatical arrangement. I translate commands and data.
Six thirty. Thirty-six hours and counting. Six thirty and thirty-six hours of anger
paranoia hallucination. Step on the scale. Eighty-two pounds of fragile sick tick marks. Tick mark, scratch, cut, bruise, and thirty-six hours at six thirty in the morning.
Memorize Shakespearean soliloquies. Step on the scale. Eighty-two pounds
without the weight of faith.
Faith, here's an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales
against either scale; who committed treason enough for God's sake,
yet could not equivocate to heaven.
O, come in, equivocator.
O, come in, into it now. Come in to this sleeplessness
this restlessness, this day in night, or night of days,
or well without depth enough to write these lines, without depth enough to
Memorize Shakespearean soliloquies. TV recipes. Kitchen witchery and spells for prosperity. Depth. Enough to shake this feeling, to dig a hole at the window, to stretch these arms, this building, these muscles without framework.
My love is a building
a building
A building of confusion and chalk. Six thirty. Thirty-six hours. Step on the scale. Come in, my love. Twist tongues into tick marks and bruised
tongue twisters
Peter Piper picked a peck of seashells by the seashore
with the toy boat toy boat, toy boy toyboy poor boy poorboy
and sandbag the silence.
Beth Fleeson says, "I am a recent graduate of Chatham University's MFA program. I love the smell of sandalwood, fall leaves, and wet earth. I've never bitten my nails, but I have bitten people. I enjoy being lost but not feeling lost. I have never owned a gaming system of any kind, "self-checkout" at the grocery store scares me, and I always wear my seat belt. I enjoy skiing, smoking cigarettes, and wearing blue jeans straight from the dryer. I have smashed a car, ridden in a taxi, gotten black eyes, been on stage, and find myself regularly infatuated with the mundane."