there.

 

Katrina Rodabaugh

26. TO READ AND READ STARS COME CLOSER WITH HUE OR WED AND UNWED AMONG THEM

 

To read and the note read my body is still groggy wanting to be locked and lucid in a dream.

My neck and shoulders are stiff and I’ve yet to speak.

My hands are curled and slow and eyelids falling heavy.

Too soon to be staring or computer is too much rush push or light pollution and also buzzing.

 

And the body aches to fall back in space where stars are held in teacups and hands reach from tree trunks spread like swallow wings but across shoulder blades her traditional bird tattoo.

To love and miss like that traffic passing midnight missing.

The white and black swirls around curves they had not noticed.

Petite black heels show toes then slung back around the heels or edges.

 

To ache with it.

To read and the note read you are kept warm in something knitted in four chambers pressing or expand and contract with exhale and inhale or four chambers with a space in the center for your safe keeping.

It would not keep her call her safe.

They knew this.

It would not keep her call her safe regardless of the city or the country.

 

And curled into the spaces kept inside cages made and meant for ribs and made and meant for keeping chambers or safe keeping.

Inside like dream and language and now thinking are inside too.

Exterior like language and roadmaps and bridges and things meant for connecting but sometimes also kept for keeping in.

She said psychotherapy is inside with the unconscious inside with the symbols more than symbolic inside but he did not believe in the unconscious.

You me we needed to hear it.

To remember the invented although she never finished the research by the front stoop and then not speaking but hers and also spinning aching swirling.

 

To stretch hands like wings across stars like sky but to touch tree root and freeways and parks with ponds like hands but curved like fingers so we call them lakes or feathers.

Crown nares mandible mantle breast wing flank coverts feathers tarsus and so on.

Or bark twigs cone fruit leaf flower blade stalk stipule node petal pistil stigma stamen anther filament style ovary and sepal.

To touch you.

While touching it.

To trust is the first one.

To know is the second.

Maybe to risk is the third.

 

Half of us married half of us unmarried and then more than half of us or unwed.

Or did not surrender or did not support that sort of surrendering or cowering to.

Or unloving or unlovable depending on the moment and the human.

In Brooklyn and in Oakland this was still problematic full of juxtaposition and conflict with convention and contemplation that was a cultural privilege for certain.

 

To read and the email read the weirdness is passing and time.

But disregard or to be disregarding.

To be unknown and unknowing the hands stretch but feathers caught where fingers might snag or catch or have had song and flight and wind to carry travel without necessary oil.

 

She said lack of agency.

He said I think I’m starting to understand it.

He said I will keep the smooth rock in my pocket forever and I mean that I mean ultimately until a forever but what he meant was until another one.

Six years later and she is not waiting or waited.

Six years later no rocks pass in pockets like stars or swallow wings or freeways connecting like bridges and subway tracks between them.

And to think of you me we so young and fearless and maybe foolish or to think that we were foolish yes certainly foolish in contemplating who was featherweight and free.

 

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there 2008