LETTER HOME ON THE THIRD DAY by Lauren Haldeman https://laurenhaldeman.com/

Annotated Peoples Make Connections: if they walked around in love/for love/by love with SFX labels to their chests

My feet feel gravity ungilled. They shuffle how an airplane lands at night. The towers hiccuping bubbles like they just had a habanero telling us which way is up and which way to burn in inkwater. Here a padded slope with the headlights of trench fish, bifarious and lighting the turning down, down, down. Aisles of a hushed sway of seaweed heads. How to show the fish a mirror since they live in one? Would they find solace in the doubled-lumen and wish for a field of suns to warn us? Cameron, you couldn’t have imagined the abyss better. Cut lights, action in seats. We don’t need a crowd, just the silver screen and the octo-armed creeping of you to shroud shoulders. Oh, Mariana Madonna, forgive me. The chamber dims next to nothing, the fish swim even more alone unlike us. A mint, monsters- kisshandshouldershoulderfurrow, some screaming, and a whole a lot of carnal mystery between electrified pinky fingers. We never have to talk in there, only with our hands inching closer. Nobody, even me, knows something in this very room enjoys red velvet turning black more than we do. End credits roll. Your many thumbs-down review looms over the mountain bigger than Everest. Your EXIT grin naphthazarin. You hiccup all the way to the parking-lot digging for kernels with my humerus.

-8 Haley Always purplemonkeysexgod69

;-)

Annotated Peoples Make Connections: if they walked around in love/for love/by love with SFX labels to their chests

Let us. Let rays. Let the light carry down. Let us end upon the pavement for eggs. Let us hold the line together and play it, see the blurred story in between double bows. The tendrils we pull apart loosen as girls touch and girls know how. The soaped slack tendrils made of smoke, gold flour, and bodies pressed together thicker: toast ‘em twang ‘em. Make it all snap back into place slightly welted. Let the sun snap back into place by the time the last of the storm is clinging onto our fur. We’ll hold down the fort, hold down the band. Hold down the trombone, hold down the fulfilling of growls. Let us watch the thief enter the mountain. Let the mountain know someone is here. Let us course, let us condense all night of the filmsy things, make ‘em leave rings on the table. Discuss a cavernous bone tide shaking its whelps into braids. Or convene on the subject of a sugar-rough heliopause and us on its edge, the Goldilocks Effect us. Us of the bonafide tendons. A catty tone, seriously though, lets us stretch things that lock, these things that wars are begun over; a flighty foot, a lifted lid. Let the heat timbre of us strike all silent until all that’s left is the density of hips unto hips, celestial buds of the purring evaporation. The window greets us, the world beyond steals all the dark things we disciplined, with the same marks of our ever-sorry hearts written backwards as replied letters from the stars dashing the strange blue. How else can we see what we have said through our nostrils coarsely of men.

-7 Haley Always soredemonao <3 & <3 &

Annotated Peoples Make Connections: if they walked around in love/for love/by love with SFX labels to their chests

my ears; jurassic lying dogs that crack an eye at the slamdoor&shuts with gutta-percha abandoned housevines. serum-anaesthetic so numb-far from toilet, bagful-godlessplastic will do. hear for me, my gadgets, my souls floating. ersatzdoktor, label-lapel I can’t read-with-the-focus-upon-what-doesn’t-gear like your time-piece. flatback & tucked sweat-buckets in headwrap, time-bandage bondage aesthetic, glass always darklyrevels when I sideblink after a long venerable-dreamless vulnerability of recovery. lumpedmargin&scalebalance rightlywrong, mainstream-mainassimilation, a sorry surgery&a sorry stark&a story basks past healwalls. salt-pillar contraption, failed bibelot & doktor begstrip me clean by feeding unmentionable blackwater, this red ear watches the clock write on the wall in your fontfondle at dix/ans saying awayput&shelveold. (implant-in-you)zip-locked, covered in foam as to bobblesail hobbled to ocean’s end garbage southfevered bering strait til it burns redsoftly litsoffits & I clarity again, your termclarion & my termthanks for this tyrsttrying no-thanks. ventilated&veritable signs return adult&born.

-6 Haley Always darrenvallery

Annotated Peoples Make Connections: if they walked around in love/for love/by love with SFX labels to their chests

His hand is on the latch as I latch onto his mirage. I think picket fences and Tom appears or Huck. White-washed. No water passes through these slabs. He says, open or doom. Says, room or perish. I would have circled the picket in zen. Or stopped as an O, away, taking in. My friend, auditioner for Avenue Q, has no clear idea of the profanity of rules. Move along she muppets, the voices of New Yorkers pushing through. The sign lofts high, as his eyes audit, ender of worlds, ender of traffic footing what was once a street corner. I put my hand on his hand on his latch. Is there room in this square, I ask? Prophet says, do not question but know: a migraine is a gate. See God in this intestifiying point of light beyond the foreground of Earth, tight as orbits. Sweat oozes the buffer, the pores of fences under the picketing heat. Protesting the flow of water past dead wood resembling asylum walls, Tao Te Ching limns the fool-hardiness of a members-only club. My hand on your hand into the life-jacket washed white for launch. You say it is to help them spot us in the clearing. In the cleaving of gravity. I scrunch my hands to ease the premature imitation of flight. Flames must near the skin, along the fence, until it surrounds us as everybody chop-sticks downstreet. Surrender, and the migraine appears, pouring, a cult of light poison, chime goes the hand ruffle. A raffle, a raffle, prizes for the beyond. Your hand on my clench on the latch.

-5 Haley Always riadovoidostoevsky

Annotated Peoples Make Connections: if they walked around in love/for love/by love with SFX labels to their chests

We stance, backs to each other. Although, it’d be easier to posture away from the blowing wall like proper lean-tos huddled against the forest. The hood of my windbreaker is warning me of a northernly tense. Slapping the chapped east cheek, go!go!go!ooo! We didn’t talk. We were cross and a T, taking turns being battered. The waves were nodding with our tempers. Incessant. A nagging suction upon the loose lips of land. You spoke. TIME-OUT. And I saw it. Quel est ce sable? White fleeting bounce small pink grains in hundreds untold greenly shifting tumble blanketing glitter the stripped rocks jagged or old-round shot through by vrai delta veins. I do not know song but I know the beach, la plage, oui, and there’s no better place to be but wrapped by a zephyr that finally un-capitalizes, t, t, t…familiar as Antibes’ cobblestones car-free. Let’s leave speckled words to memory’s sister, ma soeur, mon coeur?

-4 Haley Always

Annotated Peoples Make Connections: if they walked around in love/for love/by love with SFX labels to their chests

Their clothes jerk from swimming on past their single legs. One in short-shorts, an Aussie with floating lips and an eyeteeth lick. Other wears the slinky number of a black needle which also translates into his palm, a reading she swears by. She stops him to look at her blue frame, his feet sinking as he plants himself, fresh mound marks the first g'day. Look, a cursory ascending of dripping hands for him, here fuschia words dip after a fall. Faces are dependent on and under a neon sign. Desert. Strangers warmer at night. Tropics. This barter, this marketplace staircase halfway platform succiently bathes both in purple full stop. Climb in- flashes the sign. It highlights her secret bulrushes; the bed of stones is for melting.

-3 Haley Always

Annotated Peoples Make Connections: if they walked around in love/for love/by love with SFX labels to their chests

Here’s the pit I emerge from. What do I look like now? It’s not the now but the how. I went to pet a kitten. Instead of a thousand paper cuts around the ankle- here’s my body I emerge from. You should be worried. Meaning, this surface is on another surface. This boat collapses. First, the oars went, not down, but to save. The oasis could care less about the sparks. The sun is the biggest bitch of them all. The darkness, the blackness was soft on the way down, the drawl of death’s velvet jawbones. Correction, that is the baddest bitch of them all. I could feel the panther of the pit’s walls before it exorcised its umber eyes upon me and swallowed. I swallowed it sharply and never caught fire and smouldered in arrest beneath the palms, my alcohol ash swelling amber only in wind. Here’s the tusk that emerges from me. It has married the earth of an stomach. The earth waits for rain as it simply does and does, and man, she’ll make an urn out of me. Here’s the kiln I emerge from. She loves me, she buddies up as rough flares, the diamond-studded depths, and the buoyancy of midnight. Here I love, here I am open indefinitely.

-2 Haley Always

Annotated Peoples Make Connections: if they walked around in love/for love/by love with SFX labels to their chests

At first I was grateful. My proverbial handkerchief had been picked up. He blew the piece of cotton high as a manner of greeting, a quilt piece-a doily under my coffee now a cloud. We were both light, light from casting off home. In a building of pillows, sheets, shut curtains and fullsome acts amongst sewing materials, I looked down at the audience of the waxy floor after the transient rain. In a slippery distance, water and light met in color. We met in color. I chose to leave the defined end of the bridge onto a future copy. The room looked like mine. Except he was in it. We met again. Coked up each other at the Columbia end of the spectrum. As this end of the rainbow became in-focus… so did the boarding call steam. The gap between the jetway and the jet jamb was on fire long after the take-off. I moaned head over hot feet, over hot cities, not that it matters at home.

-1 Haley Always

Washington skies over Commencement Bay IS THE SKY SAYS