Sessile Hound

Sophia Ricaurte

Call her names

I could love her. I could do it. I could love her deeper than she would ever believe. Miss, the day is not over. Miss, her corpse is looking edgeward. Miss, tip her over. To dress like her would be like selling stars. She wears glittering moss-green knee-high rain boots, and the tops are covered by the bottom border of her thin blush-pink tiered dress with hand-sized orange hibiscus flowers embroidered all over with blue-beaded perimeters and blue-beaded drip lines like water paths between the blossom figures. She makes it herself. Neck tattooed with black vertical lines ringed around the whole of her throat. My staring is an attempt at proximity as secondhand time. There is an ease, fun, and sweetness that is mostly strange to me. The direct line of sight jars. It’s actually only giggling. I don’t—. And I’m not that way.

I feel beautiful when looking into someone else’s eyes or defining my biceps in the mirror. Vanity is a glut of proof I exist. Naked in my style, I fantasize smalltalk because I’m already forgotten? Here was an uglier voice. The appearance of things is so sickening, I’m sickly, remembering. It is the lack of effort and labor and care while that’s the main sustenance she feeds herself. She’s running circles around these people with the love that she loves. I’m thinking. In pageantry, in disease, there’s a shard I’m thumbing somewhere the green stopped. My whole demeanor can be chocked up to naivete. What I want is impossible. I am undignified. Wasteful. I’ll grow out of it. I’m beginning to sense nothing is about anyone else at all.

This is the heap I’m looking from, the salivating, pesticidal, raging, fighting-itself, cliched heap. I pinpoint my responsibility. When she stops asking these people to love her, I descend. I am after the mirror. To whom does attention belong, the looker? But what doesn’t belong to my mother? I’m considered.

The fire is invisible and still bouncing back. Everything in-store is a remoteness that becomes so vast as to blind the rememberer. I hardly do anything. I feel, though, sore and inconsolable. Here is my corpse not brooding, and there is another cherry blossom.

My brother comes into the bathroom, disrupting her alone in front of the mirror. He asks what she has been doing.

"Talking to myself."

He nods at an understood fragility and asks why.

"I am hard to believe."

Two fistfuls of sand and heading toward the water. I'm not trying to care less. I'm trying to find other people that care too much. Do I believe in apathy? Small shocks. Here is what I cannot have, so it is what I cannot need. I can really no longer be interested in the abundance of gentleness. I decide the chair is broken because I am not resting. Who taught her how to love? My mother. I can hear the ghost explain how to bleed without anyone knowing. It's mostly replays, speculation. Miss, hold on to her generic love. Miss, you're

The glass shows the chewing going on behind her. It's consolation, hunger acting out memory. She feels like a keychain or rat. I mean those little gray pears running along the path. When I value her, she devalues me, so I rationalize.

Rush of levity at having begged the appropriate amount. I prop my head up before it should drop to stop displaying my disappointment. The sweatshirts chatting about her soul there. Recognize what? One day I'll tell her everything she wants to know. I'll rest the trickiness like I do my last caretaker. And the idea is to kill her, is to imagine the thought-space she takes up in other people's heads, which are not ornaments. She imagines thirty seconds of stereotyping then divides forever. This goes for the people she cares about, not just strangers. No one believes in their power.

Every line is the last line refigured. She just walks around with that mind. Tissue of snot and lipstick. It's not a matter of where but a matter of dreaming, how it's expensive, meddling with irreconcilable notions of sanctity. If she feels how I feel, then I read the world by her right, and it was legible, and maybe the world will be legible again sometime, or the world might only have been read this once, or might never be, and maybe never was. Whether or not she conceives of my desperation is a question of her own, a question of how much is left, after all, of her need and despair, to believe in mine. She exaggerates her own danger and minimizes everyone else's. I cannot be sad anymore. I am out of my mind. Regret is crushing the dead, withered flower is splintering the mirror and fucking with the angles. It is a weariness now. It is a confident weariness. I'm a quitter. I beam. I draw an X on my mouth, graphic ether.

Making a day

I'm reading a tercet of scary longing and feel stirred, and then I read it again at another, very different time—feeling buckled among the world's collection of me—and I'm not moved. What used to be my connection, envisioning these odds, has been hammered into the earth, and the reading turns into my looking down at the glinting, scattered pulp of elation not knowing what grows back. The tercet becomes a horizon that I can, with faith, say is blurry, but anything more personal than that costumes impossible. It's the look of never with maybe as the body underneath. Maybe can surely burn and die and disintegrate, and the costume, the line, can be left in folds, laying there.

She's up to her eyes in eyes. I don't know what to think about the recurrences of people, they keep entering over and over but never have they exited, they pile up in the corner, and when I look at them, they are dust, and when I look away, they are people again, and I am back to being jaded they're there. She's engaged in this exhale-ridden process. Strong is how I strong is how strong is strong: the flowers are listening. I'm feeling something not willing to break anymore. But I'd like to squish the life I "have"—grind my sole to the slick pavement, get into a backseat and glimpse anything else. Everyone is too forgivable. Then what?

Walking into opaque-easy-opaque spreads on top of a body that regurgitates. Love's all in her head. There's different understandings of apology. The next page is an aborted prophet getting rid of plastic. Doodling abstract shapes, lines into every other phase of ouch, it's cursive geometry; it translates her thoughts in the way her useless causational theories are drawn. (The parabolic is naive. The longing comes back. I have all the answers I don't want.) Dawn, sorrow, dismay, and bartering. I hide my face in my tail because of the heart in my face.

The fear of missing out on obedience. I writhe without context. Around her are stymied magdalene caricatures bustling in a body-politic like carcass-flashes then suddenly slaked. I pinpoint my responsibility after a lot becomes obsolete. She suspects the "value" of words wrought by exchange.

When she's speaking, she did everything she could not to. She's not over how many times I've played the villain, so how material are details to violence? Fantasy: for a thought to count without consent to ramify outside its plot. Patience: time without consent astounded at the stability of initial affection. Gradations among everyone feeling superimposed and inextricable. The access to my tears and deterioration of my acting skills. Hopelessly adapting to her deficient profundities with false clues into where her pain leaks, she studies, only to gaze down at her nails, to stall. The way people sit around a room silent with the same information.

There is lots of danger I can't define, but at night, if night arrived, she'd cry on the right shoulder, like nothing ever happens again, lean back harder, hand there in the water. Love is the easiest, most convenient, most available thing in my body.

No is the default, so when approximations to love are sensed elsewhere, conjuring the force to so-called revert back to the loneliness that a certain world claims is her coming home to herself seems stupid. Luckily, so many things are true and don't matter. She can't get herself to cry. Miss, what's the score? I feel a cry threshold increasing with the water levels. Public crying is a visibility of loneliness that redistributes sadness; everyone gets a cup. The onlooking at a crumpled face in muffled gasps and compact tears incites a knowing and an incapacity that becomes shared and easier. She is temporarily unable to seek avenues for displacement, and refuses to practice, but knows there are many experts, cosmos in her hands. People feel, at least, weird.

There is lots of danger I can't define. How can she stand up there and say this is different from that?

The difference between feeling and thinking is sorry. She is bored and theatrically anguished by people who cannot manipulate this beach to their advantage as well as they should like. She includes herself. There are lots of insects that buzz beside my disorientation. If I'm confused every second of my life, why am I asking to see a clear thing and act as though it's regular let alone necessary? And yet, I don't want to miss the suddenness. It goes by—I go by, she goes. I admit I'm wrong. She is looking for the unmarked moments of rupture. Shame is our best consolation so risk keeps gaining dimensions. She can't afford certain conjectures. With the niceness?

I wish the flight paths in my head would brightly collide. She maintains the hilarity. She laughs through her sentences. I feel indifference encroaching like a lost bird. Apparently, people cry for a few minutes at a time. I'm one of those worms under one of those rocks; accidents prevail. I think she just knows the extent to which I'm hurt—I think, I think she's just saying she hears me. Anyway, my belief in magnitude falters. My coat, though, is not ephemeral. She has these actionable feelings that are miserly but lush. She's poisoning the myth daily. It doesn't even feel like labor anymore, though indulgence is also labor. That's the most important thing, and it's nothing to lean on. It's nothing to make a house out of, but I'm not making a house: I'm making a day. She knows days end, and I forget shelter when magnitude is my spirituality. I can't bear anything else. Miss, what do you have to show for it?

Not having the thing appears steeper than having the thing but it must be the same steepness. I feel relatively sure about that, bitter. If only extinctions were obvious and better publicized. Try gaslighting me and it will work immediately. I'll fall straight through the floor. Such active thought-labor not believing in what people say she is. I am not anything left out of the early emotions of.

It's been like this, the ease with which she can make herself sick. These are the half-lives. Jealousy and white rose incapacity and always paranoia and birthday paranoia. Her dreams negate waking efforts at upholding this conspiracy. Certain mornings she's debilitated. Many, it seems, enjoy themselves. Pleasure and nausea holding each other. Lock me in my childhood bedroom and let me cry for the rest of my life. I walk around, going on and on. She can't take this city, feeling like the doors only ever creak or slam. She's starting to hear a hissing in the shower, her parents are dying elsewhere, and she's seeing everyone in their veils.

My eyes almost meet the passing woman's but put a bullet in the floor instead. I feel familiar again with freedom when I'm sitting still and staring at the exit sign. Insult me. If I ask her to repeat herself she won't. Fuck this bridge. Fuck this burn. Fuck this house. Fuck this noise. Fuck this nation. Fuck this tone. Fuck this mile. Fuck this mountain. Fuck this gold. She is more beautiful.

People are really gone.

I can give someone something. This myth went to the market and perforated me. I'm trying to start from scratch and paw at the romance. Cultural cowl over crises. Not unrelated is to problematize amputation, cauterization, phantoms, early death. When I salvage me without her, I sink into nostalgia for grapes of joy as her public-facing face. I just don't quite distinguish that from muscle cramps or calluses. There has to be pride in the dynamism of a life seen, but I'm having trouble with the dot dot dots in between that and my pillow. Say epiphany assists. Say coincidence is frankenstein. Polymorphic diamond. Geodesic, she and I. Tautology, also, so that reflection and analysis is the elongation of novelty. Miss, who took the best of you? I look at the boat and pretend it's a boat. The replication of this thought. Prolific purple. The proportions can't sustain themselves. The proportions are not she loved every child.

The disparity the disparity the disparity the disparity the disparity the disparity, she. If I'm on fire, I'm supposed to roll around?

I think of her as a prop, so that she can sit there thinking of everyone else, and so more precisely describe the ways in which all the people are careless and dull. There's crooked hunger meanwhile I keep on slouching. I'm reveling at the bus stop finally alone. I should meet with her to watch people ruin things over a napkin or so. She could wear a sash and I could hold her. Make a religiosity out of it and let the indifference oxbow.

I don't want to hear the tote bag. It's an act of remote control, which is ugly. I can't stay awake. Peacefulness is a, a competition. I've been green with her. I have my mother's mouth while socially identifying as an eyeliner pencil. If I fork and knife the lie enough, I can bear my age. And, I keep running into another wall. Consonants first taught her patience, which justifies why I'm so testy. Slope. Oh, I see now. Oh, I get it. She's emblazoned. Miss, that's not the point. Put me down, mom. Put me down.

Language is less than the fluid canyoning heart to head. The season tranquilizes me. Moments of lucidity, like oil loosed out the clown, I forfeit. There's the fear-that-was and the fear-to-be. Spill, apologize, stop, she says, making intimacy a game. She jumps out of herself, imagining land where there's not.

She makes her love convincing. She's put out, tired of feeling. Honor?

No more questions.

Games are worse

There's been a car accident inside my mother's desire. It's not a matter of where but a matter of dreaming, how expensive, meddling with irreconcilable notions of sanctity. She just walks around with that mind. The exits blend into the walls. The feeling of my whole body undissolved. There is the frequency with which people don't listen, and then there is the error, which is much bigger than calculated. I get the jerseys mixed up when the hours are this derogatory.

Everyone is too forgivable. Then what?

I wonder if she'd hurt me anyway. The trails are well-traveled. Sophia. Sophia. Sophia. Sophia. In the common combination of reprimand and disbelief: Miss, your own venom must be sweet. I'm not ducking. I apologize, thinking in the transactional again. I planted my anguish in full sunlight, and rain, and wow. I can ascend rain. I end up like the soggy paper torn by the shoe of the mother who wouldn't fight her daughter for her daughter. Alas, robbery. Nevermind the daughter. No one earns their war, it's in the taste buds or vertices as invisible. If I put a tennis ball in my mouth, everything feels like forward. After certain fallacies are exposed, life becomes hypotenuse or short cut. So many zeroes underfoot. People clean up quietly; the onomatopoeia is prior.

Pity is an antagonist, a chill even when softness browses bone. She's con unnatural blondes. She's con New York. She's con games. Games are worse than sadness. Fun is a big game. Don't take her at her word, but believe her. There's a treeline, four posts, and Ohio mulch very comfortable with my femur. The story sets. There will be beauty. There will be beauty. Stop, please, she says, harboring resentment in the heel of disappointment. Passive aggression is just static. I, rigged in power trips, bloom, aspire a rage that goes far enough to mar the tools even. The thing about mistaking debt for the solidity of trash ultimately narrows down to the bed, the bed being trash. Debt cannot be solid without also being a bed, and debt is not a where upon which to crash. To get ahold of disappointment, after all. It's consolation, hunger acting out memory. Who taught her how to love? My mother. I can hear the ghost explain how to bleed without anyone knowing. It's mostly replays, speculation. Miss, hold on to her generic love. Miss, you're bleeding. Normalization is speaking through that, wailing through the dithering. I lose parapets, because in the everyera of sporadic jubilee, she opts for mountains over molehills. The first blow is that logic isn't in totality but frames, garish, inherited, cheap ones. Guilt won't break and shame is shards too small to sweep. I have mistaken envy before for something whole at the bottom of the can. The search bar is not recourse. There was an object in the bag that wasn't the vomit in the bag and the interiority landslid, the gloves extracted the crystal thing, didn't wash the crystal thing, and the shine blacked.

The point of the game is to walk away.

Shame clotted.

I crawled into the hole, bent and crossed my wrists.

I slept.

The weapon is more honest than the child. That is the nature of resort.

What was I thinking? I can see so much farther now. I can really soar. It was so easy to hurt me, but now she's so pacified, stably bored. Hearing about other women also crying on the floor makes her feel salubrious, concrete. She readily sighs in self-defense. To decorate a cage is to anticipate tangents of typical whirlpools, to try, instead of assimilation, to keep the zhuzhed, mascaraed barrel-self bobbing around in harmless addictions. The sex I was born into is spiteful groundwater. This, this is my whole *hand movements.*

The cage is enormous. The amount of people that use windows as mirrors approaches peach fuzz and who accosts who. Attempted contortion begets paralyzation while there is plain neglect. The abject is either destination or a lead. Telos, Mercy, Mercy. The mirror still rants a beauty mark, collar-bone symmetry, claims my prismatic hush. I return the delay, desire being narrative. Communicative individuation upon which listening is tattered, let it remind something of beautiful couples and the base craziness of that. Wincing, people don't behave. The abject is foosball is "I mended my shadows in an art-tangible huff." Kidding aside, I prefer weeping. Piss splash and wherewithal with the same arbitrary fortune-tag. Everyone knows everything but there's a wall that's difficult to find and then trespass.

I just want to push her. Nothing serious.

The cowards line up and conspire to be believed, and these are accomplished motherfuckers. Those who act like love is a cautionary cone to kick around graveyards also breathe like someone is in charge. The hard questions can be tabled. There was a big meeting without her, that she missed, deliberately, where everyone decided they wouldn't mean what they say. Her eight eyes and eight legs sense that the voting was unanimous, and now she's mumbling again on the street. It's so easy to be distracted, to eclipse details with hotter water, louder poetry, no solitude to feel, consume and grab and call all salt the same. That story about the princess and the pea, where there's twenty mattresses, but the woman can still feel the pea—that's—I'm sorry—give me a second. That story about the princess and the pea, where there's twenty mattresses, but the woman can still feel the pea, that's happiness.