Districts
I make rice to try and recover it.
I turn the heat down, I turn it off.
I wait. A bronze horn
slides up the far wall,
dims, goes.
Six days the same as any other.
Six days dripping bright
and cold from our fingers.
The windows open
so as we slept the city moved
through the somber
loft we rarely left. You half
spoke in a dream, I woke hard—
in the morning, at midday,
oily dust on the duvet.
I kissed the back of your neck.
When I rested my cheek
on the old man’s desk
the teal wall shuddered white
beside me: cases of Morphos,
their hundred pinned throats
a career. We see, said the book,
what we already know. Language is lack,
it provoked. We walked miles home
the apartments above us going dark.
The river smell blew around us, sour, green.
Ahead, a thin man was swallowed by an alley.