Kristen Orser

Dear girlishness,

Like an unwound clock, a sorry little bearded son, I love him for the way he is buttoned.  It just happened that when I broke the egg with the back of a spoon, everything was there. 

                                    : My body can make a sweater and tether you to the door. 

                                                Somewhere people are swimming and concluding about physical evidence.  Here, eastern windows eyeball the very detail of my days spent in bed, spent hallucinating about broken sentences.

            How do you say this more simply?

                                                 : All the eggs fell from my dress.  I tripped over the                                                              shoelaces and a fire let loose in my other ear. 

                                    This makes even less sense:               

                                                                                    I interrogated all my desires:  The sugar bowls are broken, but the creamers are intact.  Do you think I know what's going to happen?—I am longing to put your earlobe between my fingers, but December draws in and mail is less frequent. 

I was born and spent the whole season without protection:  umbrella, the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet, cystoscope.  I am, myself, not a continent; no lollipop in my throat.  I sleep in an endangered skirt—so nobody is connected under a hoop without phone wires. 

It's a pitifully small kind of love, the way that I love.  It's the kind of love you have for someone who sucks the poison from your wound. 

                                                                        I keep his wasted frame wrapped in skins of newly                                                                            slaughtered sheep.  I keep wax replicas of his body                                                                            in the cupboards; some of them are sent about to                                                                                shrines to be burned in oil.  I think it sprouts from                                                                             the beginning, the fascination.                         Aha! 

If you take a photograph with somebody, you are more connected to them—neurons in the brain tell you that you like them more than you liked them before you took the photograph. 

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