miriam karraker

synthesis/i never said i had to make up my mind ∞

i told u i was silver as in i want to be at the in between, blended quiet statics or quickening u r unsure if i am liquid or solid or vapor woman man person smoking an e-cigarette at the bedford L platform i tell u i am silver and scrolling neither here nor there u ask why i am googling places to get acrylic nails done on fucking bedford which would be the wrong place for it anyway and u ask won’t it be hard for me to hold her later but i told u i was not a shortnailed queer rather i’m both/and and practical because one hand will be acrylics while the other a gel manicure u wonder how i’ll play the synth with such long hot pink all over both hands after she’s left me for not being a good lover or because of her fear of me and men together i will make the sound a glitch and a stream conscious my wondering i mean wandering eye on that man on tinder who said he liked how i told him what to do and not just because it got him off but he likes how i talk hard and feel soft and turn on the square and sawtooth waves together some witchcraft i can make it shimmer and scream it does not confuse him and he doesn’t think my desire fool’s gold, fleet or glitch i feel like i’m holding him rhizomatically here and i wont apologize for my shimmer and i wont need to because he wants to talk about how he has to go to the dmv then somewhere else less bureaucratic and maybe even soft i was watching this grey cat in the yard instead of listening to him i’m so busy feeling sketchy, abbozzato, sorry, non finito but he said he’d get home and work for eight hours, a real new york day like how i’ve been having real new york days going to dumbo then midtown then chelsea goddamn i hate midtown so much but there’s this cash only korean place in a basement with an unmarked entrance and i get both noodle salad and tempura because i never said i’d had to make up my mind who really can decide in times like these you said once that fast fashion is what made us this way and i felt it really hard as i was standing in a towel in my apartment for a half an hour staring into my closet which is full of black blue white grey grey grey because i feel too visible in daylight when i wear a nonneutral like how i was just leaving his apartment at eight a.m. wearing the long green dress with the slit and how i took the b44 back to williamsburg but it stopped on fucking flushing so i walked through most of the neighborhood feeling loud and disrupting the peace of children and mothers in those stockings and fathers and neutral brownstones in this green dress that invites the eye to my waist and legs and the fluttering hem around my ankles so loud from the blisters from walking the rest of last night’s tequila off in the haze, i wish it’d rain and wash me out in the static but you’d still know i was there, just a latent sine wave i told you i was slippery, non finito non finito non finito non finito non finito non finito non finito non finito non finito non finito non finito non finito non finito non finito non finito non finite

Tonic (Tourmaline)

Some thing

glistens in the crag,

on the impress

its parallel, elongated

acicular prisms

radiate pixel-like

and magnetized

to either granite or

the metamorphic schist

yielding its exuding

elements bi-colored,

pink and green,

not at all like fruits

you are thinking of,

unless it is fruit covered in

quartz gauze,

no, there is more variance

in its colors, its form

trapping and refracting light,

always with three-sided slices

bundled in such a way that

you have to be transfixed

by the shiny mass,

the visual delicacy

making your mind’s eye

wonder why you grab

at what is shiny,

and for once, this time

what is not metallic or sweet

but is definitely

sparkling.