two nights ago was memorabilia Me and a teacher’s student pitch masks on the beach in Long Beach Island, under slapped water there are orcas, I’m floating in spongy dark blue midnight lines through it like conduction waves in loose cerulean tomato soup, ghast: the robotic camera lowers into platform swimming pool abyss, farther from sand, closer to tile generates mass white and black killers that slip through the glue and into my arms not unlike spontaneous generation; no sunlight hits their backs and returns opalescence – I’m enclosed. My teacher’s student sells masks with animal faces, submerging oneself in water is a common indication of journeying deeper into the subconscious same as when killer whales and sharks seen in crashing translucent white the doctor worded in his comment when you needed to unearth Roman ruins from full-eye-pupiled, banana- to-the-head synthetics before the after prom, yet without gravity (which requires a center of mass) waves don’t collapse caverns dug by memorabilia, and in those milliseconds the doctor can’t see you because he “lived” through the void while English class convinces objective fact is subjective so maybe the ringing is her curiosity under the ray of pale algae transcendence and we really need to look down. – I awake.
last night’s dream was yesterday I saw last night inks of red slipping from narrow slits across my brother’s body except it wasn’t him at first it was another woman with the same eyes with skin that was a few shades lighter kind of like mine until she turned into him deep crimson soul escaping onto his clothes in a room he calls home. afterwards my mom didn’t believe him so I ravaged through the trashcan sitting under his desk for a shred of proof but all I found was bright burgundy string that blew away with a blink of my thinning eyes. the night before I read about someone else with a slit in her back, feathers dispensing flying through the air the only indication tainted maroon of the encounter, I closed the article but the cover must have opened back up sometime past midnight when their eyes released their willingness to hold their steel framed locks closed with their hairs. she warned me of the dangers that lurk outside those windows: one day they’ll come after someone a bit younger, who still bathes in blame painted onto them and the people that look like me. Maybe I was the one trying to hurt him.
Three was a mistake all the best times start as little lies, balconies like fire escapes on the side of Soho and tiny red plastic gloves with cranberry juice, if they don’t even know where they are how can you. don’t bother calling, by now they’re too busy forgetting the guys dancing in tight circles and tomorrow’s fluorescence rings and their new family and wet mornings in new york city and closeness that makes them recoil and how they’re not meant for touch on Tuesdays. now there’s bottles and bottles of blue on the table that crack with bubbles when too close and tubes of foam on the floor made for guns that bend and break under soft hands. everyone’s seen people’s arms so close as they spill rocks in defense of their cravings for the right. you wish that they could forget about their fathers too because they’ve all gotten used to the force of one another on top of them and never laid fingers on waking up in the morning with their friends. so many people have lost everything for me to be here, and I’ve already forgotten that two hours before I was afraid someone would call me sin with a good look on their face. but tonight it’s not me it’s them and they obscure pandas to make shorts feel better. the brush of wind against daisies is foreign but warm flesh is even more. I thought this life would make me glow but turns out hanging from light posts makes it easier to fall into magma. no one knows that light isn’t bathed in hormones like it is for them. my leg kept brushing against hers but she talked about someone else in the car.
Photography Credit: Jason Rice
Frances Cohen is a student, artist, and poet from New York City.