The Days You Have Left | QLRS Vol. 12 No. 4 Oct 2013

Sometimes the death of another suits me to practice how to die
correctly: I cover my body with a laced-sewn duvet, another layer
of blank skin, and feel the silence trapped in the room with an arid
mouth.
            Sometimes when grandmother cleans the dishes, the water
about her face speaks to me in a liquid litany that begs to be left
alone once the soul in her hands gushes out and breaks a silver-coated
plate, puttering the unfinished residue of dessert around the map
she plotted to find herself back. Sometimes she leaves the kitchen
as messy as what history tells about the eve of a dictator's table.
Sometimes a fabric cleaner forgets the taint in the dinner kerchief
embroidered with my name that never belongs to me.
                                                                                 Sometimes
her blindness interests me to hide myself and predict how she would
never find me in the sparse basement where I placed my clothes now
unfit, and fading handwriting. Sometimes I want to clean it up and
pretend I have not a single memory of you.
                                                                 Sometimes she sees me
avoiding eye-contact. Sometimes I say I couldn't find what avails me.
Sometimes she feigns her sleep and shock me like you did once when
I was about to kiss the moving blight in the corner of your lips. Sometimes
she tells me she's stronger than me, asnore after her sudden tickling,
wrecking her bed the size of Kuo Pao Kun's coffin. Sometimes I believe her.
Sometimes I think she's more believable when she breathes with her jaw
hanging like a hand holder swinging in a passing train available for every
dirty hand. Sometimes she buries her earrings in the Javanese soft-paste
porcelain she bought six years ago just to get them back when she feels
her beauty fades. Sometimes she says she's living in what comes after
three capsules of solid blue methamphetamine take effect, a long life.
Sometimes I check our mailbox to prove there's something new in it but
there's really nothing new in the life of living long but nostalgia, a domestic
disease. Sometimes my Vietnamese tea raises afloat bitter leaves as soon as
searing is postponed while the night leaves the chest of an overwatered
cactus inside my room, open and capable. Sometimes I see your face in it,
the face I stole from time to mature with and once dripped my tongue
onto the depth of its scars chiseling the fears unwonted to me.
                                                                                             Sometimes
I don't see anything anymore. Sometimes this happens when I remember
how the closed gate failed to trap you. Sometimes my knees shucked by
a rain and she will ask What's happening to you. Sometimes I don't answer;
my lips are the heart of the ground when sometimes I don't really happen
in the fold of time you chose another man for the days you have left.