She picked her words carefully as if she was choosing tomatoes from a pile of yesterday’s produce.

The talk was to tell us about the uncounted
I am the girl with the apple.
Bring sensitivity to criminalized bodies, she was saying
I am the one digging through my knapsack, making a ruckus.
But how do you un-stitch politics from data collection?, someone was asking.
I am the girl who took a second bite during the Q & A session.

“That’s an interesting question.”
Apple juice is dribbling down my chin, down the sides of my fingers.
“Funders have mandates.”
“Funders have machetes?”
Someone glances over, my third bite
bit around the orbit
made a last ledge right on the spine, near the core.

Across from me on the train this morning,
I watched a woman fall asleep,
seated and swaying.
And I could tell, she was used to this
— knowing how not to
let her head rest against a stranger’s shoulders
even as it bends towards it.

Blue fingers and a slanted blood red dress
I weave through the tangled cracks
which knot the sidewalks.
My bone and skin are on fire
as it lands on rivers of stone.

I dreamt I was pregnant. And pleased.

I dreamt I was roasting live fish by the ocean, against a violent and bloody sun. The fish turns dark and charred inside the fire and I place it with great care on my plate. The fish writhe and change into earthworms which refuse to die. They try to escape my plate, my fork, the cave of my mouth where I thrust them in anyway.

And slurp them like slippery, electric noodles. I have question marks hanging from my mouth.

Dreams need to be diagrammed
The bend of my plant towards the light
needs measuring.

It smelled like sun baked
feet. Strewn across the yard
were pieces of car tire rubber,
marking the empty backyard.
As if some un-imaginable demon had
let out its rage through the underbelly of automobiles.
Rigged border wars
a blunder
scattered lead
Tires and splinters
grate fired coal
feet and sun eat blood,
Cornered

As evening slipped into place, the glass pane that I was leaning on, had grown cold. The setting sun baked its last heat into the window pane and bent the light inside the room. Spots of color appeared on the floor like stains, like spills, like mistakes.

The rupture could not be mended – there were no tools, no words that could help. The wounds were ossified relics from an older, gone-away age. They were necessary memories of a forgotten people and a left-behind time.

The trick is to not let time unspool.
Keep those minutes and hours boxed up, carefully.
Spend each second stingily — it is one less metaphysical flake from your mortality after all.
So un-leash each minute as if it is the last breathe that you take on your death-bed, remembering the loves of your life.
Leave infinity to roam inside you –
let it gather momentum and rip apart each scar and rush through and out.
Leave infinity to crash around in the hollow of your heart.
Let it spread in — out.
Leave no room for uncertainty; fold it’s dull chipped edges into a corner.
Be fickle. Unmask.

She liked the edges of things. Yellow borders that mark caution, fire escapes and brick walls.

She was drawn to splinters, scraps, bits and pieces of things. There is something about clutching only a shard of something that feels correct. The broken moon, bent flowers, singed bread toast. Damaged books with crumpled edges.

Most things are too big for us to grasp anyway. Most things lie empty, clattering noisily in the dark — waiting patiently to be released, to be collected. To be gathered up, to belong inside a bundle.

She preferred things that were left alone, too shiny to be discarded, but forgotten nonetheless.