Jesús Castillo / from REMAINS

The opening remarks came decades later. This isa piecemeal offering. I would sit next to you if I could.But we’ve yet to select a place for the affair to end. We know there’s no thirst without memory. So you fasten your belt. We head to the cemetery on a bright afternoon. Tulip gardens patch the hills. Young couples pass the timeby renaming the kinds of rubble. Instead of lossthey have dream. There’s no heartbreak. For the length of a cobbled day, whatever they see in the other’s gaze drips from the buildings as music.

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As for the question of what can’t be retrieved from the tanglesof interaction. As for standing on a drawbridge above adry riverbed overlooking downtown. I mean the reasons wehesitated to make contact while all the ways we could fail or succeed passed through us like rays illuminating rooms only wecould see. Noticing a bird landing on a wet branch aloudas a means of buying ourselves some time. As for the walk back to the car. As for the heavy cages that sat at the bottom of us breaking. Getting caught in the sand with our clothes off neverwith the voices from the street making their circles in the raincrossed our minds. All the outcomes we had kept in orbit startedcoming down, one after one after one in a hail.

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No more standing in a circle. No more birds of paradise. No steel frames. No rules nailed to the doors. No more doors. No more waiting for the right grip to raise the wrench. Nodogs. No cats. No dragonflies. No elk. No sleeplesssharks floating quiet in dark waters. No more goldenfeminine laughter. No elders. No clear skies. No wasted hunger. No more cleansing rain. No flowerbeds. No railsNo stems. No proper names. No safety words. No walls. No more childhood ponds. No dining by the shore while theships wave. No more blinking. No more passing cars. No

Jesús Castillo / from REMAINS

more wine. No more music left in the caves we tagged withspray paint. No bread. No roads. No standing castles. No close listeners of echoes. No more comfortable songs.

From steel rooms, we kept the cities optimized and hangingfrom the skies. In the hot evenings of September, I sat in bed with my back against the window. The music from the basement feeding the walls. Our ceiling is white and peeling. Each year we grow more attached to the things we think we’ve earned.The day-and-night sound of the cars fades in and out of earshot. And we’re standing on concrete, waiting for asignal to appear before our eyes. The sudden slowingdown of a random moment making us see. People getting up and leaving. Some of us at tables, studying our accidents. Parts of our livesbeginning to resemble paper boats.

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I had a kid sized version of my father’s rocking chairand wide open days that I spent tearing off flakes of shale from the cliff next to our house. I tri-cycled down slopes. I scrapedmy arms and was chased by street dogs for having thrownflakes of shale at them. Thinking but not having the words tospeak of the feeling of smallness. The earth’s architectureseemed to care nothing for ours. I’ve almost forgotten itnow, as we exit into the morning on cold days. We exhale and stare at our breath. We go for the car keys and try out a line from a good movie to test its ring. I have been dead for years, we say, but so much of me still lives in the places where I stopped to look around.

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If you enjoyed the pipe dream, you might also like old rumpled sheet music. If you enjoyed the heavy air of your childhood farm, you might also like these hauntedcastles full of ivy. If you are lost in the forest, this tiny bellwill keep your memories until you find inner peace and no

Jesús Castillo / from REMAINS

longer need them. If you liked the slow sex of winter, you will love these dead flags flapping in the sunset. If the roar of the last few tigers kept you awake, you might enjoy this new coat of red feathers. If you keep falling through the floor duringyour sleep, it might be the perfect time to count your losses andlearn their names. If you enjoyed the splatter effects of our latest war, you may take a stranger’s hand and step outside.

Spring would catch us. It would see us trying so hard to cry like animals. It would surround us with curious plants that could feed on our leftovers when the time came. In the clearing provided, we could kneel and disgorge ourselves over and over, and out of our entrails would come the smellof our neighbors, beside it the stench of blood, processedmeals and bits of dream. If we could learn to cry like that, each time we flung the door of a new house open, perhapswe could remember all the things gone, in precise detail,without trying. It might surprise us how much the momentwe both stood in our boats looking up at the bridges at nightcould unhinge us.