– Read this, – she says.
– I thought of you immediately, –
she says by way of explanation
for the magazine she’s placed in my face.
So I obediently murmur through the first
few paragraphs as she continues,
– Burma,it’s horrible, just tragic! –
And I nod, yes, yes it’s (unspeakable,
intangibly tracing patterns a tattoo
outlined repetitively; just twitching;
a lizard tail still moving; a beaten dog)

–Yes! – she interrupts,
– That’s it, that’s what they say, exactly!
Just less poetically than you put it, and –
(the place I had visited, the people I had met,
they had been past pain)
– Yes! – she interjects.
– Did you ever, – she starts to ask
(I started, I had tried, but I could never
bring myself to…) It was not mine.

– Oh! But you will when you read this!
It will draw it out! – she enthuses.…

I come from a place where the paint peeled off the wall,
she said, trying to explain. Trying to explain the
what and the why of wherefore the words, her words, were
slipping off her tongue at angles obtuse.
She had come from a place where the paint had chipped
– it was flaking still – it had come off in jagged
sheets of plastic skin. The off-white had given way
to eggshell, beneath which the sage had become visible below
the salmon pink which could be scraped away like chalk.

It was just sometimes – it was just sometimes that –
when the talk turned the conversation to the side
and left her sidled, it was those sometimes
that she let her tongue slip along the freshly plastered,
stuccoed wall – only to find it smooth.
These new-build, purpose-built, all-of-a-kind, one-of-a-piece,
monoliths in which she could find no layers, no sediment, no edges.…