Skip to content

Autobiography Of.

I’m trying to become habitual, amidst all
of this. Though two years back, spring

passed over the whole of New England
like a broken promise. I owe it to myself

by now, good creature that I am. Like the cat,
I want only to hum in the window’s loneliness

of light. Stare into that blankness & unconsider
the plot implied by outside. We call her summer

sausage & feed her meat scraps like the good
little hunter she is. There’s death

& there’s the sport & Glory of it. Behind another
window, a different springtime is live

streamed before me, pixellillied – pastoral of
your unwatchable funeral – yours, as in, For

me – though yesterday, there was a just
yesterday: steam of midday qahwa rising, rotund

with your laughter, every silence
gutted open by the grin of you; the border between

said & unsayable: a quiet
or disappeared decade – Filasteen

or negative image ofmarriage or negative
image of – Khalo barely remembers you

& Teita’s love story, at the apex of Country(ocean)Not
Country, of mine(border)mined – the notions

of you converged into a single blessing: Sido –
when you left, did the space between our histories leave

with you? Every notion of country – every inaccessible
conversation of? I’m trying out past tense on you

but it wells on my tongue like a confession: the last
time I saw you, I left you early to kiss a boy

I thought I was in love with, though all of me
understood you’d go to your grave

unknowing. There’s distance & there’s
Distance, Earth

& the collapse of it. Though softer
than I can imagine, Khalo speaks your name

in the names of discipline, of immigrant & both
words beyond my self, both unfilter

& uncommit – Auntie says she split your skull
open once & after, all you could do

was hold her, weeping & trembling. I could never
stay like that. I already left you

to see a lover I’d end
up leaving for an open window, or any other

implication of loneliness; though it was you,
in quarantine, halted mid-bud – the timeline,

at once, an arrow &
its quiver. The held & been

holding; every was knotted into
becoming – something about the interruption

of a body, leaves me
unforgivable & how can that image me anything

but negative? Uncommit. Say past & mean be
yond – I am therefore

I I before. The self that wrote this
is already a notion of former. There’s a grief in me

though even that is – pardon, has been – sequestered
beyond reach. Beyond inevitable, & outing

of. I promise, I won’t promise. I don’t heir,
I err. I reach, I reach & only

air – this ecological almost, right
there: just beyond my window, an inaccessible spring.