The Measurement Problem

The sapphic movies we half-watch. Your exes’ accounts. My wet socks. Half-moons on your floor. Your hand on the back of the chair. Me believing that being in touch survives its punctual non-arrival. That hour. This hour. Tell me when you get home. Here’s my bed. Spend the night please. Eat while it’s warm. Sit down for a second. Hand me that knife. Open the window. Take these dry clothes. Be there in a second. Can you leave the window open. More water. Lower flame. Less beaches. Meetings between the gaps of punctuation. The pressure from the air conditioning unit gets cold. Care gets straddled into minor adjustment: my brooding variation for warm armor self-impeaches memory into fragments. 

Peaches grow on deciduous trees: the very idea of a singular core value not in motion. We go on like that for a while. Hospital fluorescent lights.

Deferred lucidities foam at the mouth. 

Your hand knows where to slip-up before the re-st of the evening dozes off. You said probably to the olive oil. And those movements of hands remain and stays with me. 

The lid jitters in re-place. The re-flow of eerie and idle mishandlings of history’s intimacy with contact: the distance between glitter particles, a make me forget the color kind of bookshelf nailed to the wall. 

A density of touch without total ruin. The cold press of compression. Quiet and operative as starch in water. 

Remember, your arm against mine again, wet knife in our hands, the bedroom re-lit again, the train re-passing somewhere under and over us, rainwater still dries up from our clothes in the next room, all of it inflowing at once, none of it willing to stand in for the full moon’s rerun, nor enough to be called by one designation of re-action re-enacted. 

At the fold of your feet, I wanted to appear less breakable than I already was. Thin grains of sand leaving our hands. Steam lifted conscious of the air between us. Below and under us people rehearsing reality. The kettle re-gathering itself, withholding the density of leases barely put together again. New York puppy love. Take an old red line through the dark. Back the blue police slogan the city’s plans. Below the orange window, our neighbors speak reggae to the drift of static droplets of hydrogen on cars. It is so strange how all of a sudden, a room can begin holding more future than the people inside it can share. Waiting for water to re-boil everything right away. Then you kissed me. A landline in the carceral matrix. I got the hiccups. My temporary answer for intimacy: a deep blue tone rain gives Brooklyn when ‘the motion of light in water’ wants to look electronic. 

We face up, then face down, then face up again. Wet cotton soaked in radiator dust. Across the sheets shifting the cutting board. Your roommate was away. Unusual devotion. The blackout of a flame’s receding outline. The dish soap feels too sticky.