Door to a Forest
How jalapeños feel in your mouth after they've softened in the pan. That green peppers softened the same way are almost but not the same in your mouth. You try to invent a new recipe but the flavor of bamboo, green pepper, pork, dofu gan that your old Chinese blah blah blah made, scent creeping upstairs as you hashed out math symbols: This all forms nostalgia in front of your face. You start the thought again. Soft green plus a different soft green. You start again. Something clear as vodka or bells. Egg cooked with sesame, chili oil, seeds all settled with salt. This may not be available as you become more elderly. You try to cut nostalgia at the roots. All these years, you've been sequencing and gathering. These green thoughts steep into a real forest. You step behind the house you live in inside your mind. Over the course of nights, people meet you there as if they are simply living on the other side of a curtain. People so real you picture them or know there's something you forgot to tell them after another day of IRL. There's not really time for this, you can barely live the waking life. But there it is, your life each night when you dream, or whatever is happening that allows you to meet the leaves cool on your face, something not alive and not dead that you've walked through for ages.
Absence
The sun streamed strongly into the room from somewhere but I was haunting it from the attic hatch in the ceiling. I kept seeing myself down underneath in the bedroom. Moving gold rimmed tea sets. Folding laundry. No matter what I did I couldn't quite make eye contact with the me living below. I tried to get my own attention. I put on a green corduroy dress that was my favorite color, rotting boots like dirt, I traded my hair in for fire, I took my face out so there was nothing there, and below, other me was witless, looking to the left and right. Attic me was scaring the crap out of real life living room me. But real life me could never actually catch a glimpse of ghost me, no matter how hard I whipped around, I only ever caught the edge of flames or the window of nothing where the face had been. What had I done with my life to make my future dead self so profesh at menace? Guests sipped tea, nodded, pretended to believe that I was being haunted. I wanted to reach down from the attic and steal something from me as proof. The way you might steal a cardigan from a sibling thinking it's wasted on her, it would look better on me—it's wasted on me, I mean—this world/this I that I/that the rest of us kept using so poorly.
City of Purple Fire
A man walks down the street. He's the factory man, the co-workers hail him into the warehouse, but he's also the man you used to love in real life. You're in the middle of measuring carpentry. Bricks piled everywhere. You shake his hand, fake a work face. You wake up, realize your love for him was a snow postcard of him, some fever to cook to, an opera to blast over whatever disappointed. The next night you dream he and you drink cola together on break. You're both speechless from the tension. The night after that, you see in his glasses the city on fire, purple animé fire, it's the fire your blood is turning into, and this is stupid funny. The fourth night you dream that you and he agree to a date. At work IRL, you feel like you're supposed to text him. You walk down the hall and while people tell you things, dream and reality fold their laundry together. You'd actually told your friend last month how funny it is you don't care about him anymore. The feeling just burned away. And the fifth night, you dream you're in dark room of books, the outside world is bright, you finally finished putting the walls together. You watch the street, he comes in the room to face you, it might be a library or a set for a library. He leans in with his glasses on, you see the purple fire flames. He backs his head up, and then so he can kiss you, he takes the glasses off.
