The little circle marbles down the glass streets of my imaginary universe. She is purple and mystical scented and smooth and spoiled. The squares till the fields, picking despair off crops that will be burned by an army of disenfranchised futures. The triangles, red in their harshness and love of good wine, stand on the porches of their crystalline cottages, watching our little circle travel. Until she meets a sphere, and she blooms with possibility.

Rushing rivers of reverse psychology spill from pharmaceutical sources. I used to be a gummy bear. Now I’m just juicy. I have to believe that Language, digging the shallow grave in my yard, doesn’t mean it for me, but he constantly sneaks up behind me with measuring tape. My hollow chest contains a snow owl for a heart, digesting always a scurrying sin that squeaks on the way down his gullet.

I wash my hair as most wishes do, with sea spray. My alabaster legs stick out at desperate angles as I trip in the surf.  I think I was made by a 22 year old for whom graphic design is their “passion.” Or perhaps a logger, running from the ancient aliens in the woods. Either way, my eyes slice the fruit of man’s labor like an orange, dividing it up among the jackals. My hands are oxygen, a dream of sublime strangulation. My name is the river flowing backward, flooding her banks. I am a wish, a need, a woman varnished and unverified.

Feminine breeze tousles the leaves. Autumn candy and coolness and customary costume. Bashfully, I look away from my plate of autumnal goodness and feel him touch the sweater of my cable knit body. The male gaze is so kind and generous compared to the female gaze. Where my female gaze sees stretch marks and drinks my absinthe, the male gaze sees my generosity of softness and toasts the haunting video poetics of my hair communing with the breeze. He makes me a sandwich. I dance for him in octopus octave, my intelligence in compliant arms and luscious, plump living. This language feels weirdly spacious. I need a poetics with room for me. The male gaze strokes my breasts with a silken touch, while the female auditions for the laundry list. I feel powerful and delicate when he plants me in fleece and calls me snow flower.

The sun was not enough for me. My face was his rose, tender with fragility and sweet spice. My voice is a cornerless sonnet wandering over the badlands of my curving, roiling psyche. I needed more to wrap the soft landscape of my body in a dream of domesticity and feral, fertile goodness. He selects me for his vase. I smile, a horizon stretching across my floral face, my eyes the blue moons good things happen in once.