everything i touch i touch online. i touch the thing that tells me to go to it and be with it. the thing that is underlined. on nostrand i touch the foods drawn on the sides of delis. i touch the paper cups. the semicircle tables are green like the hats and swimming.

i really love to stare at things. i stare at them by touching them.

is it pink-pink or tink-tink when you touch it? it is something like that. all touching happens in darkness.

my baby holds me tight and says i am like johannes kepler, because i have issues.

my baby loads film into his camera and says he thinks he is losing his hair, or will. he always says this or that about what will happen to his hair. i walk over and grab it all in my hand like a stalk of wheat. i kiss it in my hand.

it takes the courage of your heavy and wood grain heart to even say good morning to the same people every day. you don’t know them at all but you must say good morning to them daily. as if they were all your husbands in bed next to you, staring at you in disbelief until you say good morning.

sometimes it’s better to hide in the library, where you can hiss at people when they try to talk to you, like a silent reading creature.

sometimes it's better to say of course “a tree grows in brooklyn.” because trees grow everywhere.

sometimes it's better to say art is generally bad. that is to say good or even phenomenal without exceptions.

there are millions of threads coursing through my pink pajama.

you laugh. you don’t toss your head back like you used to-- just a mirage, you chuckle while you find the house keys in your gringo tote.

you lean back in front of the magritte. the one magritte—there’s never more than one—this is impossible, until i finally leave the yellow crescent i’ve made for myself and given away—until i have a room and shoes to stand in and less money and this one window facing some manner of greens. but why should i complain? houses are burning down on the internet.

sometimes i wish it was still that metallic evening i walked between the yellow buildings of old nice, that were for their own reasons faithful and silent—and their sentences much longer— they were basically tall lanterns, and it seemed then that the world had only women in it. but france is like that.

but now i’m counting pink threads in my room and outside it’s the same old brooklyn i know: “nobody understands me!”

well good, i want to be here, counting.  the process is called artificial selection: an accumulation of favorable tempers—this is the thesis of my family. we’ve been fingering the blinds for centuries and our fossil record is evinced in a billion small fruit bowls and marble ashtrays, atomic designs, the stuff of life was in the garden outside. the living function joined and made a collective sensation—that's what we do. sex and the greens we are specific to.

i just forget, baby! i haven’t any notes by which to document you. i watch you trace my shadow like it's a family tree, swept into microfiche, my little ten seconds—for closer perusal. it’s like lampreys, your relative architecture, linguistics, structures. i count the threads and listen to neighbors arguing outside about parking spaces. 

joy and illych are twins. their mother died one year after their birth. now they are five. or ten, combined. i try to read them a book but they keep interrupting me to say, "our mom is dead our mom is dead." in the corner their father sleeps with smartphone in hand and wakes up a little to nod his gray head in response, "yes it is true," he mumbles, "she is."