Haptic Feedback

Sleeping bodies move like land—fractured, merging as morning breath wives the blue-print of the room to memory. Everyone is naked in our home. Thighs-released, exhale across sheets as swallows outside are still, confused in alchemical want.

I use a blue light to remove my clothing.  I balance sleep by holding a grey ass in the dark, and slip on its sheerness. My head bleeds from the fall. I wipe my blood on its cheek. I pull its pigment from the dark.

Please pink blood, please fluff death. My mouth’s citrus is bound to the molding. My hands smell clean. Under the guise of connection, radio waves pass through rope-bitten thighs asleep in a post-wildfire winter. The blue light reads: A tragic typhoon kills 900 in the Kanto Region. Debt flies through the home 

through breasts and livers, constricting lobules to stains of evaporated milk. Icing to ensure our children and the bankers’ intimacy will examine the animals leaping from the waves, splayed in medias res, stirring nodes and pylons. What’s more stirring than a body shaking to release 

a name? I’ve heard mothers and past-fuckers screamed

in this room. I don’t want war. At 22 I splayed my genitals to the animals. I touched myself wherever the text asked. I shoved whatever objects were close inside me. Pens and silicon passed through others asleep in the radius of the waves as the radiation that couldn’t hide a just, drooling, disenchanted-associative living, pursed in the reflection of our littoral body, fringed with swallows outside.

Patrick Redmond received his MFA from Brooklyn College. He currently teaches composition and creative writing at CUNY. Recent writing may be found in Silver Pinions, Bomb Cyclone, Prelude, and elsewhere.