dust in the wind

june diary

your face in the airport after i landed in delhi. your face after a year smiling beckoning me to come near unashamed. your face at the theatre three days later as we watched a movie together and some guy with blue button ups went on and on about the fibonacci sequence. your face horrified at his expense at the expense of his dolled up blue haired date thinking shut up shut up everyone is looking can’t you see them looking. My face smiling at your face. there must be a word for this feeling

I kiss the fortune teller because he said my brother will be all right his tender cheek freshly shaved, his hair, long and his fists like my brother, his eyelids like my brother, he will be alright because i have kissed the fortune teller so the full mouthed blow is enough to guarantee a week of satisfaction and I might have to come back next month with more pennies and another pressing kiss/ when we were fifteen my brother would kiss every gentle flower he could find, he would stand there filled with sodium lactate and kiss. 

On the first two lines of your dream recollection.

Everyone was sort of crying because they were all sort of dying like an epidemic but over a decade, a slow disintegration of bodies and everyone afraid except teenage girls kissing other teenage girls in boy band concerts.

I was there and you were there, circling my daddy with different stories of how we knew each other, circling him into oblivion like the little secret games we played in high school: sitting at opposite ends of the classroom, playing blink and you lose, stand up and you lose, someone touches you and you lose. Circling our daddy at this wedding dinner, this celebration of love. Duniya kisi ke pyaar mein phoolon se kam nahin. The world, when you are in love, is nothing less than a flower. I say everyone has gotten so beautiful with time uncles who threatened me with scissors, now a decade older than I last saw them; babies grown into people with conscience. The world, when you are in love, is nothing less than a flower— the wedding song. We are playing this game again. We are incredible at this.

sometimes you are awake on the turnstile/and the peacocks sing their mating tune/you think of a world with a lot of mating tunes with/ infinite glitch self fulfilling sex fantasies and olive boys who love you back/of entering from their front door house and dancing with strangers as you do all the kitchen steps like a jiggly wobbly baby but/ you simply don’t care because you’re never weird about things like food money or/ body fat percentage and/thigh gaps so/ it’s all very sweet and the turnstile moves around in a circle/ You remember last week your friends gave a big feast dinner and you cried yourself silly because they sang the birthday tune in bad falsetto/ at fourteen you would dream of birthday dinners/ you would make them a thank you card and color it for a decade.

How wonderful to be speeding downhill your body this afternoon                                                              Going very fast and very slow, how wonderful your charming face                   
                                                      don't mind if I am not funny for a second and please don't mind if there’s occasional crying or mentions of how long it has been. 
 last week we were like birds meeting after months of migration. 
 last week i was contemplating miracles

speeding on the highway until we see a dead kitten.  I think if i were alone I would not have stopped. Baby iam not nice like you.I would have driven by but now that we are here you park our car in the corner as i say in my head a little prayer, i say she was loved because i love her. she was loved i love her . I dont remember any other prayers or gods they taught in catholic school or mums house. i dont remember any prayers at all and neither do you. The kitten is barely alive,  you hold the kitten and make her a concrete grave. You coo at her little black body as I think about what i would have done alone.