MARIE LÓPEZ

WILSON'S PHALAROPE

When the weather gets dry,

raisins harden quietly on the branches—

a system produces itself.

No one notices or cares.

Those who eat them from small boxes

inherit their pattern.

The city creaks at night like a hinge

In the morning its glass girders are flushed

With light until the afternoon hollows them

A phalarope once spiraled

in a shallow basin near the refinery.

It spun in place, indifferent—

mechanical hunger reeling

Sun on west-facing faces—

not radiant, but reflected projections.

They hum toward sleep now, practicing

tomorrow’s provisional diagnosis.

But then something funny always happens.

We realized halfway through the film

the subtitles lagged by half a frame.

We didn’t know Italian,

then or now.

A sun-scalded, matte-skinned vehicle

passes thought as if it were terrain.

Distance, a kind of grammar—

the road refuses tense.

Desire mistakes

Arrival, also in Italian.

The phalarope reappears.

If a still point keeps spinning,

was it ever moving at all?

Modernists are too preoccupied

with the Epic of halophilic particulars—

an us of others.

I feel celluloid, radio, mythos,

machines, windows,

monosyllabic carbon footprints,

pixels, light leaks, car exhaust

all undoing each other.

Wilson’s phalarope would feed

in the swirl of these residues

if there were water left.

Screens cracking

acetate lacquering

what is left behind.

INTERIOR DESIGN

By the window, I catch you rehearsing your laughter—

it’s not dishonest, just miscalibrated.

Your gait invents a puddle.

Gripes leak like oil spills—

mild, iridescent,

refusing the fate of evaporation

The summer’s blacktop is breathing like you do:

with heat and suggestions.

Eventually every mood demands a floor plan

and I have never trusted the promise of spiral staircases.

Logic, it seems, is engineered.

An indiscretion of middle-class structures.

Hours of sigh practice loom ahead.

A Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.

All surface and circumference.

I’ve learned to name sensations,

to shelve them alphabetically

under textures I mistake

for the smell of old receipts

or an unforgiving slant of an evening’s light.

We play this game:

I tempt impressions

heat, suggestion, what once evaporated–

into a duplex of competing interpretations

I call this decor. You call it evidence.

The furniture is rearranged nightly. We forget where the bed used to be.

MARIE LÓPEZ is a writer and artist based in Brooklyn, New York.