How to Braid an Artery

: I laugh with the velocity of pigskin, discussing god with boys I will never see again. we toss languages around the table like we remember them, hull asunflower skeleton with our eyes:

:: an event

is just a set of things. a Sunday ago I:

: the street spills over our tired necks, & my brother fumbles the relic, scratching his script into tree stomach. my body: preceded me by three centuries at least. the city sculpts a screenplay out of us, sidewalk promising summers we might not survive to drink. Aleppo’s back hums when she sits down:

: I remember the city like a demarcation, or a divot in coffee.

: it was never about hagiography. it was about my tombstone & writing something different on it.

:: tell me how Aleppo taught me yardage, her treasured aches, listened to me stretch, eat. I braid the sameness with which we bleed, arrange the tolls on my wall like linebackers: tell me how I gurgle these letters, the dead’s grammar, the dead:

: a year ago I kept canisters of similes in my basement. I

watch boys become men

every night. I eat the music that makes me old again: my brother:

: recites the pavement with me, too busy to notice the varicose veins in

the asphalt: