I.
After The Listening Room
by René Magritte (1952)

An apple squeezed into space
falling out of windows, only
bits of it, like the green can
last until summer, like the shine

can last past when the last of
the water dries off it, I hold it
up until it fills the whole room–

there’s nowhere left for me to go.

When it starts to rot, the green

doesn’t fade to brown, the shine

sticks around a little bit, it just

shows my reflection. That’s how

you can tell something’s eating it

from the inside out, it takes
up space, my room, it fills me up

and my person with it and then it

shows you what’s inside and it

shows you to leave it alone.
Look at it, look at my face, who–

ever told you it was a good idea

to be proud of me?

II.
After The Married Priest
by René Magritte (1961)

The apple is real this time
has devoured the relics
received from generations
of seeds, of apples, of me.
How illogical to be frozen
like this when the moon
is out everyone wears
a mask when the moon
is out of time the apple—
real—hides behind another
fooling no one, it will never
leave a conversation first

unlike seeds fallen from apples

unlike me, the desire to fall

from grace mediates it
informs the desire to fall.
Loser

I’m fleshing out what it means to

be a loser, squeezing the fleshy

bit of my thigh that was covered

by a tattoo as soon as I turned 18,

shoving two fingers into the flesh

of my neck at inopportune times

to make sure I haven’t forgotten

what it means to be alive. There’s

something fishy about this.
The human experience. The flesh

experiment. Made-in-lab like the tags

they give fertility babies. If you slowly

replace all of me with skin grafts that

don’t take, am I still a loser? The Ship

of Theseus— flesh replaced by

wood—a reverse Pinocchio and this

will be misconstrued because here I am

tugging at my clothes as he tugs at his.

We’re mirror
images but it’s not until Tuesday

that I can tell we’re the same or I

never existed or he still doesn’t. A

paradox of flesh inside wood

inside flesh with a painted exterior.

A game of tag inside a fish bowl.

A fishy alibi for a fleshy loser.
There is grass where my heart should be

Pulse, instead, in my arm, my thumb.

Spring thumbing its way up from dirt

between dead leaves. My skin feels

raw when I let air touch it, touching

just-cut grass as if it is me, I have

learned that it should be gorier than

this, like red with blood or life– that’s

what I’m supposed to say. To see

only green, to feel only
grass between arteries is losing hearing

in my right ear, drowning through the

day when Charlotte starts learning sign

language– that is spring. My arms like

tree trunks, I used to think immobility

was possible, was kind, before I was

grown over, grown through, grown

into the age of grass and dirt, I have

not seen a single flower this year. Gore

turns green in the wake of my fingers.

The grass has outgrown my ribcage.