eulogic 

so much of the anger is distant, a bell ringing in the fog from some ship or another, they are indistinguishable, indistinct from land here but still some sound shaking the air still some wave passing through me, inhaled through salty wind or trickling, a trickster stream, drinking deeply before i know what i’ve consumed. a place not even my own, never his, never again. who is to blame for blurring them together? such a crime, a greatest fear, becoming invisible to wear another’s face, yet we are not so different from all of us, any of us here, categories only i know, distinctions in a tilt or glint or inhale or caress (was there a caress? do you remember any soft loving glances? was there a softer word than you had spoken? who can say that they even know?) truth forged in memory as much as by mold, an angle of furniture. photographs taken while lagging behind find love in shoulders and hips where it was always missing in eyebrows and lips, rhyming there and there again to see the absurdity of naivety in my desire to mend what only i could break, over and over once more-- so i hear his bell out in the ocean, i smell their scent in cold gas stoves, i hear their breathing before they speak, but it’s long faded, scratching only the very back of my throat and no normative claim surfaces from those sounds baffling me from the colder wind. i crouch in the forest trembling, turn my head in the forest pacing, press my hand into the moss and blink to clear my nerves for the sound of birdsong and the rustling of small, bright creatures farther to the east.