The girl on the screen is all hamstring and focus.
A blue leotard, lightning bolts stitched in silver
thread. The TV is muted, but I can see the vault
in the set of her jaw. The mat looks
so much smaller from this angle, a postage stamp.
Beside me, your breath is a machine's work,
a two-part beat timed to the blinking green light
on the pole, the one holding the plastic bag of clear fluid.

I forgot my wallet in the car. It's a seven-minute walk
to the garage, past the gift shop with the Mylar balloons
fighting their ribbons. In the lot, under the orange sodium lights,
my Civic will be cold, third row from the entrance.
I left a half-eaten bag of Combos on the passenger seat.
Cheddar cheese pretzel.

She's running now. A blur of motion toward
the apparatus, this stiff horse she has to conquer.
For a second I think of Galileo, dropping things
from that tower, testing the pull of the whole earth
on a small, dense object. How it always falls.
The nurse comes in—squeak of her Dansko clogs on the tile—
and draws the thin curtain without a word.

On screen, she hits the springboard. Twists. Hangs
in the air longer than she should. Lands it. Both feet.
Your fingers twitch against the white sheet.

five of them fight over a smashed burger bun.
one has a ruined foot, a pink knot of wire.
the alley's brickwork holds yesterday's heat.
i sit on the fourth-floor fire escape.
your text said, call me when you get this.
i have not gotten it.

one pecks another, a jab at the neck's oil-slick patch.
their wings knock concrete, a sound—
like a deck of cards shuffled with bad hands.
my mother once said they were just rats with wings,
said it while scattering wonder bread crusts onto the driveway.

i read once how a star collapses.
the fuel runs out. it folds into itself.
for a million years, a quiet inward crush.
the landlord's cat watches from a sealed window.
this coffee tastes like how i'd imagine
the sun's core to taste at the end of it all.

another pigeon lands on my railing.
too close. stares
with one side of its head.
that unblinking bead.
it shifts its weight. its
small, moving chest.

He kept the loupe in his eye; it was
a strange new pupil.
Said, No parts. Said, The company folded.
He tipped the watch's guts onto the green felt.
Gears the size of sand.
Two screws, lost.
That blue-faced hand that counted seconds—it lay on its back.

I once saw her throw this watch at a wall.
Missed. It hit the doorjamb, took a chunk of paint with it.
Later she wound it. The knob clicked against her knuckle.
Used it to time the roses, how long they took to droop
in the August kitchen heat.

And before that. The iron for this balance wheel.
Dug out of the earth with shovels.
Melted in a crucible. A man—no one I know—
poured it. He did not think about a rose,
or a kitchen, or this green felt table.

The jeweler scrapes the tiny gold stars into a plastic baggie.
Hands it to me.
A bag of shrapnel.
"For the look-see," he says. Twenty dollars.

The phone was back in its cradle.
My knuckles, a ridge of white against the counter.

The grocery list—
milk, that brand of coffee with the bird on it, aluminum foil.
Your handwriting.

I remembered a documentary about deep-sea fish,
the ones with lanterns growing out of their faces,
how they navigate a pressure that should make them implode.
Bioluminescence.
That's the word for it.

I opened the refrigerator.
Looked for something I couldn't name.
The little light came on.
I closed the door.

The trowel's handle, wood rot, a grey fur.
You left it out.
That stack of terracotta pots, a sleeve of green moss now.
One has a crack clean down the side—a wren got in, built a nest from cellophane and dog hair.
I found three small blue eggs.
They were cold.

In the back, behind the lawnmower you never drained the gas from, your father's fly-fishing rods.
The lines tangled into something like a fishing net for ghosts.
He showed you how once. I watched from the porch.
How to arc the wrist, just so.
Said it was all in the wrist.
Yours look like they were snapped over a knee.

Remember telling me about Betelgeuse?
How one day it would just—poof.
Collapse into itself and we'd see it from here, a second sun in the sky for weeks.
That was the night we drank the whole bottle of Tanqueray.
You tried to point it out but your hand shook.
Everything falls apart without a reason we can see.
Or maybe the reason is just a million tiny lacks of attention.

I am bagging up the oil rags.
They smell like flesh and dirt. Something
rotting, but too clean
to be human. One by one.
Until I pull the drawstring pulls tight—
that clean, plastic sound.

you told me from the payphone at the shell station.
i could hear the cars going by, the sound of water hitting pavement.
you said, he's gone. just that.
and i knew. the empty space in the driveway
this morning wasn't - a business trip. wasn't - an early start.
his coffee cup still on the counter, a brown ring
dried inside.
the packed bag i found, shoved under the bed.
levi's and three grey shirts. the receipt
from a motel in another town. it all added up. justified.

then you said, i hit him at the intersection by the bridge. he swerved.
my whole body— so this is what it felt
to be right twice a day.
the wet road, the sound of the tires.
i had the truth, but i had it wrong.

did i know, standing there with the phone cord wrapped
around my index finger like the hair
of a girl in love?
i believed it. it was true. he was gone.

the neighbor who looks like your father is shoveling snow.
you watch him from the kitchen window, his third-floor flat,
and for a moment—the red-plaid jacket, the stoop of shoulders—
it is your father. and why not?
he believes the coffee in his cup is the key to everything. you
believe the floor will hold.
these are the agreements we make
with the morning.

but then the man turns, and his face is not the face.
the jawline, not quite. the hands, different.
still, you heard the scrape of the shovel from the other side of the house,
and when you looked, there was your father,
his own red jacket, clearing a path to the street.
(he did not see you watching him not watch the other man.)
so the sentence was true, after all.

the mind is a clean room where nothing can be proven.
is the room clean?
how would you know, except by looking?
on the television, a rocket launch, a flower
of fire pushing a payload of equations toward jupiter.
they are certain of the trajectory. checked their work.
someone presses a button.
or the button presses itself.

the snow falls on both men.

the clerk's name tag says priya.
priya is ringing up my slurpee.
and i believe her name is priya, i have justification—
the plastic rectangle, the black letters—
and let's say it is true, her name is priya,
and the clock on the wall says 2:03.
so i know this. a justified true belief.

then a man comes in, shouting, not at me,
but at the rows of beef jerky, at the spinning hot dogs,
shouting a name that is not priya.
he calls her amrita. my love, amrita.
and she answers. turns to him. her face undoes itself.

so. what do i know now?
my slurpee is blue. the machine groans its ice.
(was it ever a question of knowledge? or just thirst?)
he has a tattoo of a ship on his neck.
i can see the ink bleed, just a little, at the edges.
i can testify to that.
but some are not given the standing to testify.
dotson told me that. or i read it. the words came from somewhere.
there are whole languages you are not permitted to speak.
whole truths that curdle in the mouth before they are said.

he is crying now. she is holding his hand
across the counter, across the sticky spill of soda.
my belief about her name was an accident.
a lucky guess that wasn't lucky.
the clock, i see now, has no second hand. it is stopped.
it has been 2:03 for hours.
perhaps forever.

i push a five-dollar bill toward her.
the man is looking at me. his eyes are red-rimmed.
a question in them. maybe he thinks i know something about him.
but what can i say?
that my knowing is a broken machine?
that belief is just a story i tell myself until a better one comes shouting through the door?

she takes the money. her fingers are cold.
"keep the change," i say.
a fact.
justified.
true.

the wallpaper was swans, i think, but who could tell.
he nailed the pelts right over them.
mink, sable, a red fox with its glass-chip eyes.
this was the guest room. this was where i slept.
he said, don't touch, their mouths are full of sawdust.

from the hallway, the clang of a fork against a plate.
her laugh, a thing made of tin.
i lined up the little soaps from the basket. one shell, one rose, one plain oval.
smelled them one by one. lavender, then something that was just the color pink, then nothing.
a clock on the mantelpiece chewed the seconds.

what cold forest gave these up?
the snap of a metal jaw in the snow. i thought that.
i thought of a hundred small skeletons still wearing their feet.
(it isn't wrong to think that.)
outside the window, a car alarm started its panicked calling.

he had a whole bowl of them, candies from italy in crinkled wrappers.
amarelli. black licorice, hard as stones.
my tongue went dark for days.
i took one, put the soap back in the wrong order.
pressed my face to the fox, its stiff ear, the faint chemical dust.

the pella crank handle, stripped.
so the window stays shut.
outside, the pin oak thrashes—
not a sway, a fight.
one branch hits the pane with a sound like a knuckle.

last week a man came to trim it.
said the roots were a problem for the foundation.
i paid him with a check from a book i thought was empty.
he left the stump of one limb bleeding sap.
it hardened to a dark resin.

my phone buzzes against a water glass.
screen down.
someone needs something.
the dishwasher is in its final cycle, the pump groans.
there is that bill from the city—sewer, water, a fee for looking.

i wanted to be a vulcanologist.
i saw a special on tv when i was nine.
the man in the silver suit walked toward the crater's lip.
i didn't want the suit, or the walking.
i wanted the looking.

there are knots on the bark, burls.
a disease or an old injury.
both, probably.
it holds three abandoned nests from three different years.
a squirrel just ran from the gutter to the highest branch
with a piece of mcdonald's bun in its mouth.

my right kneecap clicks when i stand.
a doctor once showed me an x-ray of it,
pointed with a pen—
you see that shadow?
i saw only bone. i see only the tree.
i should get up and get the mail.

the anesthesiologist asked about my first concert.
i couldn't answer, there was metal in my mouth.
someone's phone played tin-can bach from a steel bowl.
my husband read the instructions on the fire extinguisher, his lips moving.
you aren't supposed to look at the sun.
my ninth-grade science textbook had a chapter on it, a photograph of a flare erupting from the surface, a hot whip cracking into nothing.
he touched my forehead with the back of his fingers.
stop that, i said, or i think i said it.
the nurse, whose name was helen, drew a new line on a chart with a red pen.
her shoes squeaked.
(they don't tell you how cold the room is.)
the clock on the wall was a brand i didn't recognize.
suddenly i thought of the way black ants carry their dead.
another body. so methodical.
a command from somewhere above my head.
a machine made a noise. not a beep. a hard, final click.
my thumbnail, unpainted, pressed a crescent into my palm.

he said the form was standard. a liability waiver.
i stared at the poster on the wall, a diagram of a dog's ear.
all those intricate canals leading inward.
my wife picked a loose thread from the cuff of her coat.
you aren't supposed to look at the needle.
i read once about cave fish, how they are born without eyes, the sockets smoothed over with skin. evolution's slow deletion.
he touched the warm fur on the table.
the last thing? i said, or i think i said it.
the vet tech, whose name was kyle, straightened a stack of files.
his lanyard was twisted.
(they charge you for the box.)
the window looked out onto the back of a mexican restaurant.
suddenly i thought of how a key works, the tumblers falling inside the lock.
an alignment. a perfect fit that opens nothing.
a fan in the corner slowed its spin. not a click. a whirring down.
she handed me the leash, its buckle still cold from the walk over.