HOW DOES BEING ALIVE TRULY WORK?

Dear Samantha,

I am writing to you today from a shacked-up hole in the wall. I am hunched over a desk in a corner. The linoleum carpet is grayed with filth and there's a cockroach turned over on its back. I'm too afraid to touch it but there's no trash can to begin with.

Hotels are disgusting, but motels are a dream. I keep thinking about our perfect day together-- you with your sundress on, dancing in the rain like we were in a movie, except we were because we were on set that day. In reality you were sitting alone in the corner to take a smoke break, or twenty if I could count on one hand.

My nails are blistered and hands black and blue. I've been writing to you for far too long and for too many times for it to even count. There's a couple fighting outside on the street, a cat crying, and a train that goes by every 6 minutes.

I think this is the best place I have ever slept in for over 36 hours.

Straight-edged and sunburnt,
Will

#18 alphabet poem

a dancer makes her way across the floor
barefooted.
carefully she
drops, dips, sinks into the blackened harlequin
effaced
floor.
given her tendency to
hold on to what is hers, it seems
impossible that she can get back up. but
just as the sun rises
kicking up,
leaping,
maiming,
now
on
pointe, her bloodied toes can swallow, though their desires not
quelled. a
rond de jambe traced on her back
so carefully
that,
understandably so, the
visage of her being
wanes into the center. an
x marks the spot, and the dancer has missed it.
you know she won't next time, or else she will be reduced to
zero, like seafoam settling to the ocean floor.