A border is: status: chaste rank: too much the double‐cross: as warp and weft mutes me: her two‐timing nationality: a commotion: makes for local.











Or — between what would be faulty intelligence and the escalating violence — her head in his lap in a yellow cab and his hand on it.

How all events predict one’s presence: all meetings of minds stipulate territories. We target in others what we fear from our selves: home in on the presumption of dominance.











That summer the market progressed me beyond his Chinatown digs: into a pink light: calligraphic characters, raw fish: into a fit where twice at the same cafe made us regulars: how the verdant awning covered. To be current and read Vice there: but who
am I to judge: even oil‐mongers: couldn’t help myself: and our mutual friend was now a veteran.

The trust that sincerity is affectionate; how economics as privilege plait a classy leash.











Another day: graffiti propellers across the asphalt in Washington Square Park: pigeon strut charting alternate orientations, blunt with that home‐grown gumption she so esteems: the sun marks jazz quartets, bench‐sleepers, an advance of strollers as he holds our busy body: but West 4th Street’s a red herring: the fountain sounds fresh catechism as fact, fact jumps the fence.

The first degree of ism emerges as us and them: as all we need is a little genocide: to quote the boy on the double‐decker bus: the all bets are off zone: catch me if you can zone: take that zone: this route that was targeted a week after 07/07: or how later, in an East Village cafe, we overhear a man protest: everywhere else in the world it’s ok to be racist, just not in this country.










 
Ick: our blood pump prattles: predicts its fall: fucks sovereignty for the tsk of a familiar love: gropes his violent streak: what naïveté it cannot help: but take on for all the want in it that aerates my distrust.

In a courtyard of flagstone and rhubarb, north and without him, she again retreats. That leaving might slacken the right of our critique. To tether an inter‐ID: under a darned mackerel sky: our parallel gut. It’s distance and a dud car bomb that re‐root her: another notorious update: as, thwacked by heart, we phrase facing forward.











How migration was many things, but not a stand. Or that I was not attracted to him at
his most “American”, and this shamed her.

So clout me, slake her: our foreign and proverbial histories, at odds, expose the concatenation of borders: our body erodes between forces: expectant: there can be no
such thing as: — : to make a language of it: to bring it forth: where distortion thrives.











Or kiss, shuck: procure a vantage point from which to interrogate citizenship: how she enacts inanimate objects: their frank limits: and like a glass of Kir I am besotted: swap coordinates for identity: as she would each time: I’m swayed by the want: into sic‐ing our heart after home.