In her email Sophie asked if I’d tried writing poems recently that are just like totally you talking and the snow told me I wanted to. Talking like myself or talking about it is a distinction I ruin in practice; in my sweaters I go downstairs to the living room and the frosted glass zooms over immediately. It snows outside, people walk by windows in the snow, windows are a medium for relatable desire and my fabric gets caught on this and other occasions of mediation. I can’t get up from the couch or look away without ripping or at least leaving some residue like hair sweat or the rest of my body. I put on appropriate seasonal clothing and walk to the library with other people who are also walking. I think selfhood as a sheer pastel fabric draped across each person’s field of vision, acting out mild violence to the tonality of the objects that burrow through it. They reach the whatever-destination of the eye but leave behind a residue that remains on the fabric even as I go to the basement and wash it repeatedly. Friends burrow into me about all this fabric on my torso and that’s cool, I burrow back. Writing is cool, is it cool enough to be my burrow for me. When I want fun I mean when I want disassociation I think of my life as an object out in the world, doing object things like get in orbit or not fidget. I don’t remember the moment when, as Gary Lutz wrote, I had given consent for my life to keep being done to me, but I go along with it, I fold life into a torus of blunt grammar and break open the weather. When concepts and objects get talked about like they’re different it folds me up and I get in drawers, I’ll stay there until the weather’s over, I’ll look everywhere from the windows, I wonder if it’s happened yet, I wonder if it’s me talking by now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

PETER MYERS recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Capilano Review, Vestiges, DATABLEED, Sonora Review, and Boston Review. He is an MFA candidate in Poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.