Likestarlings

Flood Diary, #1

Her beauty helped her to a clever way of listening. Lips
open, interruption, an emphasis on grammar. How a city
is arrived at, its quiet like a pulse. Then it stops. Sparks, you
say. A little pointed. Or was it sharp. A stranger at a bar
converses in bursts, igniting in joy. An adequate diversion—
he seems to know, which comes as no surprise, the contents

of the drink, when what's required is an entire lime.
He was an au pair in France making crepes when the bathtub
overflowed, the living room submerged. The neighbors sued
for damages. Pretty soon you exhaust yourself looking
for something to talk about. What she could take out
of a person. My tolerance tapped, I'm forgotten like a drain.

Here are my recollections, piled on each other in nervous
patterns. We needed a place. The others moved away.
A morning’s distortion, a window cracked. A soiled garment
needing to soak. It felt like a lockdown. Where all the water
came from. Forgetting to be skeptical or seeing everything
in denial, anxiety exciting contradictions. Pretty soon

you exhaust yourself. I wait to disappear like a boat.
One somehow treads on, meagerly assuming debt, weight,
a kind of attachment. I listened for the set of paces, flights
of fingers a curtain passed through. An apartment is a nuclei
of vacancy. One person's boundary, walls or valves opened
involuntarily. The shape of this low is an ellipse, a surface

collapsed over its own fallen body. We were oblivious
to consequence, compelled in directions by drunkenness,
a chance encounter behind shut doors. A disturbance
under the stairs. How love divides us. Go on. This is someone
else's life she's playing. We used to talk until all hours.
But we've used all the words. In trying to predict disasters

or one miracle after another, depending on how you look
at it. A lifeforce on both sides like a river. Where you ask
permission to enter—but water takes the path of least
resistance, or so they say, conveying pleasure, or this.
In overabundance, seeping as it follows its own slow noise.
I've a feeling I could provoke a reaction. I read

"women in danger" as "walk in a jar" and thought
of entrapment, inequality, feminism. Which is better, before
or after. Our underlying currents reduced to patterns.