Bloom in Reverse

Transemotional

43 tRanSeMotionaL Loneliness is a tense in which actions can be declined. —yEhuda amichai Living in the meanwhile, in the house of the not calling, a small bud grows in the back of her throat, not as large as her fist, or fists in cuffs, or even as large as the numbers on the clock that she checks at 2 a.m., waiting for him to return and, for a while, caring. Not that large. But then, in the not calling, the thing spawns until clusters of buds overtake her mouth, the tongue and tiny mind on its tip, the epicenter, the part that knows he’s all false advertising, all trees but no viable thunder, the kind of broken that a hundred mouths with a thousand breaths could never describe, the choke and lodge and riddance of it that make her spit it out: he’s just one tree short of a forest, one leaf short of a tree, one ray— light for the bush that almost blooms but can’t. He’s gravity in reverse, the tiny fleck in his eye a Fluxus show, detached retina, ladder that leads to the word she’s after but isn’t the word that’s there. An insatiable maybe, where the heart’s ajar but hingeless, incapable of swinging in either direction, and it’s here, in the not calling, that the trapdoor in her house opens and all of the buds roll to the basement 44 where she’ll put them in jars, catalog them near spackle and caulk and joint compound, tools she’s used for sealing and patching among the things beyond repair. When the shelves are full she’ll admire her handiwork, her system of labels and organization, then she’ll close and lock the cellar door and leave the house of the not calling for another house, not caring, tenseless, actions inclined. ...