FROM THE HABILIMENTS

THE DREAM IN WHICH IT IS SOMETIMES DIFFICULT TO REMEMBER Your hip laying on my wrist, I read your shoulders. Maybe bellies have better eyes to keep abreast of a season's worth of wise gnawing. I'm blanketed by encyclopedias of cataracts and satin calluses. Where does our warmth go that while we bed we must trample it? Or is our rest the germ of fire, a memory of whatever fuels the automatic in us and dwindles us to fodder? I have to tell myself not to let your sacrum fade, not to try and spin crystal out of the pressings that encase you. I accept that I have no spot and I cannot comprehend what it means not to feel what the blackening air feels. THAT BREAD WAS ONCE AN ANIMAL

After you colored yourself pale gone, "open" and "hidden" lost all contradiction. Once you were removed, I befell the pantry, the crawl space, the supple baffle where the bookcases make staircases of the basements stacked beneath the pieces of the broken heaven stored in those throws. That bent celebration, that's not my shadow. Those are the strawberry arms of a Milky Way dabbled by stingless bees. The heart doesn't hate errands so much as it will unman any probe so its arguments can spiral chores towards distraction. Guilt is a lunchpail patina. Regret is an addiction to life-altering events. Grief falls out of the laundry like a ribcage loosens its chokehold on the old man whose infarction rudely presumes upon him before his deposit slip is filled out. Love was a bartender's pal, a pastor's reusable wool, a comparing whose dues don't cover any vicinity. The future is a remote control, the rubbery options too sober. I'm thumb-thick all over, venerable gunk, ballpointed squares entering the askesis sweepstakes. I'm on the precipice of the mail. I've messaged everywhere for your random familiars but still I cannot find a single imperative with your name on it.

THE DREAM IN DREAM IN DREAM IN DREAM IN WHICH DREAM IN DREAM IN DREAM IN TYRANNY DREAM IN DREAM IN DREAM IN DREAM IN IS CUTE

THE DREAM IN WHICH I

From the perspective of old rallying Death, we're all elements, all streaks, gloss of a minimal physics. And its this undaunted Death left you going with the vocabulary of an electric blanket. Sense without sound, primitive torso whose nakedness looks: Death flatters a wagging unaware. This is why I'm not counting on you reprising your solar reputation among the magpies. Death is deduction, I tell you, the sight of plums and doles so copious the only uncouthness that smacks is despair. Death is like me, or I take after Death. Both everyone's amanuensis and nobody's laureate; squealing alone in a sinecure, burst.

HAVEN'T DONE ANYTHING YET

THE DREAM And from my skeleton lighthouse of phthalo strokes, I see how the world bows to a perverted cardinal. Surely you were littered over that grate before me. Surely you were chasing the guarantees of sunset. Surely you remember the symbols: the urn, the amphitheater, the crozier, the low flower of a momentary glare. Surely you have won, and surely I am busy esteeming the forty separate shades of night beneath your steeple. IN WHICH WE

TRADE ULTIMATUMS

Joe Milazzo is the author of the chapbook The Terraces (Das Arquibancadas) (Little Red Leaves Textile Series, 2012) and the novel Crepuscule W/ Nellie (forthcoming from Jaded Ibis Productions). His writings have appeared in The Collagist, Drunken Boat, Black Clock, and elsewhere. Along with Janice Lee and Eric Lindley, he edits the online interdisciplinary arts journal [out of nothing]. He is also the proprietor of Imipolex Press. Joe lives and works in Dallas, TX, and his virtual location is http://www.slowstudies.net/jmilazzo.