Steam Punk Apparatus
The toast pops & I flinch like a suspect—
everything lately has been too warm,
too sudden,
too much like your name in the dark.
I brush my teeth with the urgency
of someone scrubbing a crime scene.
You left a constellation on my neck,
not hickeys—more like suggestions.
Like how a hummingbird suggests
a small god has arrived,
buzzing with nectar
& guilt.
The zipper goes down like a confession.
The blinds don’t close all the way
& I don’t care.
Let the peony across the street
watch me turn to vapor.
Let the mourning dove critique
my shoulder’s arch, my lack of rhythm.
The fruit tray knocks over
& there were plump red orbs
rolling everywhere—
some moments, you taste the cherry,
some, it stains your thighs.
I can’t remember if you said
you liked cinnamon or just
the idea of spice.
The faucet keeps dripping
like it knows something
about bodies leaning into steam.
I water the ficus with my shirt off,
pretend the leaves are whispering
about how good it is
to finally want something
without shame.
Variation on a Theme
Beyond the exosphere
the spaceship
made a weird syncopated noise
like a luthier tapping the back
of an unfinished instrument
to find where the soul lives.
The dark was lush & textured:
cashmere pulled across the cosmos,
each star an orbital punctuation mark
circling its own meaning. I thought
I’d packed my dread away
in the hold with the foodstuffs
but it reassembled like a carousel
spinning under the canopy of my chest.
The moon hung jaundiced: a rusted bolt
in the socket of night’s machinery
& I felt something unhinge in me,
quiet as a door left open.
I felt the numbness begin to fissure
the way ice on a pond remembers
it was once moving water.
My breath wrote its soft graffiti
on the visor of the space suit
& for a second, I was Neil Armstrong
squinting into a vestibule of black.
& as I looked back at the earth’s smudge
of beryl & cloud cover, I understood
desire was not a reaching toward
but a falling through, the whole fumbled
experience of the denuded mind & body.
& I floated into the celestial void—
touching nothing, touched by everything.
✶✶✶✶
Jasper Haze is an absurd logophile with a penchant for ‘Pataphysics. He holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. His work has appeared in Streetcake and elsewhere.
✶
Red Danielson is a self-taught painter and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Haiku Journal, The First Person, Haiku Presence, Little Village Magazine, and is forthcoming in River Styx. He has worked as a concrete mason, a framer, a heavy equipment operator, and a grave digger. He lives in the Mississippi River Valley of Iowa.
