proper nouns

dear all, today we began an online class called Islam through its scriptures
mail-to-order mice still huddled in a bag in the freezer which leaks

reactive gaze against the attic’s heat, water pooling there for hours
before one of us wipes it with the same dish towel we use now on our hands

passing the steering wheel back and forth on the phone with the old man
it’s his birthday, happy birthday. at the curb in front of Leela Thai

having paced its empty dining room twice for a paper bag one of us
scouted this morning’s walk through boughs of lemon trees asking

if they, for instance, could pass the virus, say you find yourself shaking
a branch face-up in the rain loosening a stubborn one mouth open

or say the neighborhood dogs, I don’t know. track the radial arcs
of neighborhood bodies casting distance between us as they pass

find the exact center of the attic’s various integrity-maintaining beams
and carve through it, inventing a city, or consider for instance a calamity

always-already-in-passing, hand reflexively shot through hair slick with attic
grime and dust and language. it would be perfectly natural to anticipate

ruin if you lived in a state that privatized access to anything other than
ruin.

dear all, this morning he ripped his whole body
off the edge of a particularly flat sky

wisteria on concrete orange particles falling
oak trees here & there veining down

anyway I could smell it on me
a future in which language demanded a little

more, a clone for instance
or several—the way the sky

shimmers with new birds like a signing bonus
my clone’s only autofictional he/him

imagine us staked out on some beach swapping
phrases & realizing after too long

they’re rocks, already
sand again and back into lemons

it isn’t as if I myself didn’t start out
as some lucky word or set of words

flighty uniformed thing as in body that twists
in & out of place, full moon spilling everywhere, oils

colors reflecting off the bed of his truck
hour of framed photos and boots his mother

thought he’d grow into: it just keeps going like that
rains until you can’t bike without skidding

dear all, what do you do when it’s childhood again?
when you’re a thing among things? anyway what’s

that really bright star at the open end
of the cul de sac, my clone tells me

as I stand here that I am licking the boot stop
licking the boot he says