Dear Nothing—, and: Dear Toast—

92 PHILIP JENKS & SIMONE MUENCH DEAR NOTHING— Why’d you have to cut out & make everything come back? With glassywinged splendor & your circulating center, you turn everything inside out so it becomes itself within itself, spinning its own airy architecture. An observer of the supernumerary, emperor of empirical, a note scribbed to the abyss as we rise & fall into the heliopause, ejected from the stars to redress some part of your interior, flesh & essence. We rest in your emptiness transfixed by a single eyelash. 93 My most reliable & delicious friend, you taste best with prosecco & a midnight make-out on New Year’s Eve, making every kiss count with final ounce of liquid light bouncing off your meniscus. Never faltering at a stranger’s troubles, fermenting, transfiguring snag to song as you hail seeds in the champagne light of late afternoon. You are the something-soon. We turn into you, trued by your pure immanence & caress a thigh in the grape-dark humidity of your fecundity. You are the imaginary, that moment before what can flash between cup & lip; the confluence of past nostalgias with the body’s arc toward radiance. You swivel under projected spokes of the unspoken, pouring light & dark all over us in slow mimosa motion. Bodies fluted, spilling finale into finality, saluting without end, our sparkling demise. PHILIP JENKS & SIMONE MUENCH DEAR TOAST— ...