FOOTHOLDS

before we were soles knocking tarmac

flagging down the queue of planes

to place an embargo on heaven

now we just drift up

through the manes of trees

into the folds of the internet

the internet is a pixelated limbo

which i sometimes choose over breathing

i gauge the olfactory of the air

and the air is cloves and the air

is soaked in altitude

and our breaths get shallower everyday

people stand on the ground

necks bent toward us they yell up

where are your gravitational footholds

are you a young balloon

or just another rogue satellite

KERATIN

i deliberately do not cut my fingernails

before drinking absinthe

and pounding them on a haunted piano

so they will break off at intervals

pave jagged canyons toward half-moons

and fall between the flats of keys

the banshee who lives inside the piano

has cultivated an appetite

for my keratin

i play a heinous serenade to feed her

and strew the pulp across octaves

down into her open waiting face

she shrieks her approval

MIRROR MUSIC FOR INGROWN WINGS

forget everything you know about relativism

because you can feel the earth rotate

and you are vertiginous

forget the green trapezoidal digits on a clock

even if they are diluting into a two-day-old glass

solution of dust and water on the table in the dark

forget the arm outstretched

across cold tight bedsheets

stroking without your permission

the glass and the morse buttons

on your shoulder blades

that you evolved away from

that once suggested flight

POSTAL

the waves understand their own origami

they fold into envelopes for him

they cap and crest for his paper

the coconut skin promising to keep safe

the blood he used for ink

so no fishes can manipulate his DNA

in expensive laboratories

he mails into waves for rescue

the caps swallow and dissolve his alphabet

they have a regular postal schedule

their flow brings no news

the ebb takes takes takes

he has been mailing since the seventies

when he was a drunk cosmonaut

who crashed into this vacation

for every woman he has touched

there is an anchor on the seabed

an apocryphal blip picked at by eels

if there were people to gossip

and call him delirious or post-traumatic

they would

sometimes he runs screaming laika! laika!

sometimes he mails his organs

but stray gulls and catfish eat them

before they learn how to arrive

he needs a sturdier parchment

tomorrow he will send bones

WE WAIT OUT THE WAR IN AN UPSIDE DOWN BUNKER DISGUISED AS PUNCTUATION AND THE WAR LASTS OUR LIFESPAN BUT WE HAVE A CARROT PLANT AND AMNESIA

when we awake

the dishwasher will have stopped

glitter will have crusted into our sock fibers

after running across the inverted bunker ceiling

wearing regal carrot crowns

with enough degrees of separation

i will be the comma of this bed

you will unravel the garden of teeth

growing behind your lips

and bite my fetal neck and body

from the rest of me

without bleeding twice

i will become the period that ends this

Audri Sousa has recently appeared in Keyhole, Pank, Robot Melon and Elimae. Her chapbook Caspian Quilt is forthcoming from Bedouin Books. She is currently alive in California and can be found at audrisousa.blogspot.com.