Jelly has a boyfriend with invisible legs. They live in a black and white house that has a red staircase with their invisible headed rooster called Quarters. Jelly fell in love with Temulent after he won a fried fish heads eating contest. She wasn't phased by the fact that he was the only participant. Sometimes, she enjoys singing him a song that she wrote. It goes: "My boy-friend -- ain't go' no legs. My boy-frieeeeend has in-vi-si-ble legs." Jelly craves adventure, and she often draws maps of places she imagines inside the front covers of the books they keep on the shelf in their office. She's afraid of the television and the color yellow and of having to spell the word restaurant. Temulent uses a white eraser to rub out the maps when Jelly is away running errands or is taking a shower. When she discovers them gone, she believes the lines became invisible like Tem's legs and the rooster's head. And she smiles big and presses her face into the blank book that ate her dreams. Pulls air into her nose hard and smells the powdered sugary scent that always reminds her of Temulent's fingertips.

"Happy New Year!!" Jelly shouts into the September air of her flat. Determined and anxious to start again.

Endless cups of hot strong coffee. Then luke warm. Cold. Joe. Cudjoe. Wrapping myself in Wideman's words like blankets. Like nets meant for safety. The corporeality of history and the exteriority of time. Space. Spaces. Between text and sound. Of Damien Rice's soft utterances on B-sides. About Dicks made of Wood. And the constancy of being let down. And never knowing the way home. Homewood. Everything burns. Becomes ashes. Even this flame that aches between my legs. Tugging at my frenum. That wants you there and the absence of you there at the same time. To feel it or remember it is the same thing. The mystery of remembering and forgetting in simultaneous instances of time. Some garden of eden when our minds figure out how to understand both. Like sipping at the broth left at the bottom of the bowl of Asian noodles. Sacraments found in eating the definition of the word coalesce. There are always the proffers of bad reality television. Punctuation to a night less well spent. And new boots worn all day long that still feel comfortable by the comparison of being without. Like shedding skins that you aren't yet ready to slough off. To let go of. The way the leather breaks tight against the ankle on the up steps of stairs. As if your hands grasp at gripping and remain there. Like children's fists on strings of balloons. To keep me from floating clean away.

No that isn't what I meant to say. Mean. It was something simpler.

Like. I'm tired.

Or how pounding the souls of these useless feet against the refracting asphalt of this useless city in which I hate to live rings shiny and sparkling like your cheeks do when I've pressed my shadowed eyes against your face and the result of the moments of embrace linger and catch whatever light bright pulses them into fruition.

No, it's still that I am. God. So. Fucking. Tired.

If wishes were kisses, then we'd both be floating easy in oceans of ecstasy.

More than anything else in the world, he loves the sound of the scissors' snip. Against paper. Molding inanimate fibers into moving flesh. His fingers hard and fast against the pattern. Slices the paper dolls into form. Lays them out bright on the dark table face and smiles. Mine, he thinks inside his head. Holds them tight into his chest like butter melting into hot bread. He would eat their fragile forms. Swallow them whole if he thought they might render the shapes into some reality he could hold intense to kiss. To slide warm and longing inside of to be lost forever. But they are merely paper and the lack of paper. Meaningless as merely representations of something he wants but does not understand how to discover.

i love you and i promise never to break up with you over and over again and then show up at your house with fried chicken and love perturbations to confuse you.

We'd agreed on stray insignificant moments driving down forgotten roads under glaring sunshine and the delirium of the mixture of love and hate and the resultant misunderstandings that--we would name you Davis. Your father and me. Fast moments we both believed in enough to deliver us up into that moment of your realization. Your reality and palpability of the fusion of our love for one another. Last night between heaving sobs and the harshness that even fantastic news can bring into a life filled with the efforts of letting dreams die I alone rename you Davis Paikea. The best friend and constant fighter for claiming destiny into lives who don't understand the need for you until it really is far too far too late.

I'll wait for you Pai. And when the time is right, I know you'll come for me.