Penelope seems pertinent, with yet another nickname murmured in a silence I know I have grown. These shades of tales, sat upright on painted windowsills, are marked by fingerprints and the pallid, pressed beginnings that, breathless, defeated, are still fat with frantic love. Sometimes, absorbed with this smaller past, of evenings or lasting flights above spitfire waters and bombs we blew, I forget the larger past. The stacks of peaches lining my block; the heat of sleeping bodies on stone park mantels; the street murmurs and even might, broken or bloody, a blight far beyond my own.
There are small mentionings, a shock of auburn curls, a corner cafe with puffed chocolate pastries where I was re-given promise, already slighted, already shattered, but murmured with mechanised meaning, a metallic tongue. Nostalgia for this and then is now muted, but peaceful, so small compared to the nostalgia on my walls, my floorboards, in the musky closets of my home. At times, I hope for a haunting--of the house, of the city, of myself inside and the shock of reminders, the small sparks of air that part my lips to call your name, bend me backwards; into all sorts of sour shapes and selves I thought long gone.
