The coldness arrives to our recognition just moments before we are to wake, it does not tap us, it casts and accosts through us as goose-bumps without hair raised.
We recognize the cycle’s practicality and in this we are not untrained, on the contrary.
To intuition, of which we have underdeveloped a slowhand, we are producing something at the peak points of the cycle and thus are first alerted.
When we muster up the determination to put on our uniforms, we feel our way through unusually quiet space again.
Then, thorns, once we have felt our ways past undecorated walls, through imported halls, which we tap into, we tap into habit finitely.
In our minds, there is one thing, the grounds and the appliance for the grounds, and that one thing temporarily blocks even the nerves.
It is not our minds tricking us when we notice the tree flashlighted, on its guard and on our guard, conjunctively.
Our knowledge kicks in and we immediately seek an answer at the breasted plate panel.
We try one disk but the illusion is not capable of guarding us from re-ality, there it is, producing in us breaking memory.
We try another disk, tapping into older memory, but we are wrong, the tree and they who have told it to stay on guard are still decep-tively stationary.
Though we feel we are the ones who have been warned, this is prob-ably just a protocol.
We are swimming and smiling with fate, that is if we could, if we could move beyond the barrier which keeps us practically mute and immobile.
Otherwise, it may be conceived as akin to something that resides be-tween negligence and happenstance, between dubious absence and absentmindedness, that is what is residual.
When it finally goes away, the area just outside the window at the sink becomes immediately indefinite.
Then we continue, streaked, two times.
Where our habits of knowledge have stayed protected and unguarded, we begin and can only begin again, as strays.
As opposed to the family’s strict historical knowledge, our wish is to zoom in totally before then zooming out prehensively.
Someone tells us we can.
But it is not so much our wish as it is one way of honesty.
It is one way of casting off the nearest external layer of ourselves and it is a wonder that this casting act is mostly unrelated to the bumps at all.
This is not to be confused with her apparent opposite, that act of cast-ing on, either.
In order that we might stay, we pack.
In order that we can stay somewhere and not be trapped by our hon-esty, we pack more.
Once we reach our one hundred days of not feeling pain in not being allowed to associate anything else with pain, auntie will arrive with our ticket.
We wonder if it makes any sense to go towards a clean slate, if it would do any better for our case.
We would like to shake the one who speaks of snakes with an inten-tion that says without saying, how dare you speak so of snakes?
So, we are finally waking up.
One by one, here, where we have already held off for a quarter of the cycle, we need something harder to hold onto through the hardness.
We wonder if we could open up to a lesser stringency and still remain steadfast.
It had never occurred to us that before waking up, we could conserve ourselves out of benefit by placing one cup outside the other.
Even if conserving is not what we had aimed for, we will have con-sidered placing one cup on the outer ledge of the windowsill before departure.
We will be fond of it, glancing at the border of awe, and then imme-diately return to fond.
We think we know, we think we know nothing, and this is what we mistakenly labeled and filed under conserving.
It would be at least mistake to give out this number and anyway it won’t work, or it will lead endlessly back to us without use.
We will be here but curiously we won’t know.
Two days ago, in order to make ourselves eligible, it was necessary to locate official documents.
Go into the office, check the filing cabinet, the second one down, sug-gested someone.
It was there, where we have received no confirmation, and now, if we don’t hear back we suppose they don’t need from us anything more.
We are given permission to take this information with us, not just as a copy.
Someone who had been left to make the labels for these various files goes a bit further into incognito though.
We receive one message, followed by one message.
They do not know our name, they do not know our name is now on file, so we have nothing to worry about.
In confidence, we are receiving no messages anymore.
We will have to proceed with the official process to handle an expir-ing document by demonstrating with name, by name, on another file.
We basically have this all in order.
We are accustomed to questioning longevity.
Then, we notice us wanting to know the name of a different tree.
We can leave everything there for you, we can see you.
But the grounds aren’t working, appliance we got to work, but the grounds have lost their effect.
It is now an inside joke that auntie is only providing for us so that auntie can eventually use what we’ve become from auntie’s providing, as though invertebrate, to provide for auntie’s daughters.
We don’t want to be cynical, it’s not about that, we want to make each other laugh.
My turn.
Someone says something about how cast off another one of us has be-come and we take this to mean they must notice the uniform.
The uniforms are working.
So it can mean one of two things.
When we recollect ourselves in our semi-private quarters in our down time, we have already shared this information with the other.
We have to let go now and our memory warns us as a form of both leisure and misleading.
Against it we proceed.
Ask us another question and if we are related we may eavesdrop openly.
The timeline to refrain is shortening, our minds funnel us through to bumped time where matter can be reabbreviated and arranged as found matter.
We no longer need the utmost amount of time or the luckiest amount of time, we are racing with finity, fondly.
The circuits do not match up underneath, they never have, and they only are recognized in patches on the ground between extra strata and substrata.
Interpolated in this trap, we are inclined to initially believe there is a pure menacing force behind all of this minutiae.
That there is a smoke pumping out from what appears to be the house but it must simply be our gold mind tricking us since nothing’s been in operation since here we got.
That there is a smoke pumping out veritably from the outhouse and sometimes when we’re close to the sink we pay a little attention to it, as though mining for something, and then we leave, indifferent.
In desperate times, we resort to more resourceful or digestible matter.
We are grateful.
When we yawn over the audiobook at double time, we hear birds cry-ing at dawn and then we grow paranoid that we did not hear them at all.
It was thought.
When we are experiencing this great change from time to time we be-come so morose, our process of conjuring becomes stultified and we suddenly speak that yearned for language again fluently, proximally.
Suddenly we bypass translation heroically and we begin to speak in our yearned for language even in lullaby condemning, in the most mi-nute of our every day motions.
You see how they intersect, thus forming a love triangle where one of them is not engaged in their tropical love life at all.
Tell me.
More.
In this morose subterfuge, we lie down in what feels like childhood and consider following goat paths that lead us into some latent collec-tiveness, do not cry.
That was random, that path, that path towards the compost heap, yet that other path, that path towards school was not random, and because we took the outward path to school, we said, come with me, come with me again to the path, because it is still there but no one knows it was once the path towards school.
Wood blewit.
No one knows the path towards elementary is the same path as path towards heap.
We are sneaking there.
Encore.
No one checks.
The path towards the elementary school and the memory of elemen-tary school is the same path as the path towards the dynamite heap be-cause the dynamite heap collective has an agreement with the board
of the district of the school.
of the district of the school.
We were naive.
We were planning for solstice, for year’s end, for the big wave of our descendants.
We were more alone when we were less alone than now when we are more alone but with our family.
Where did time go?
Back to the drawing room.
To the fainting hall.
Now we know why you looked at us like that, you’re dead now, now we know exactly why you smiled like that and walked into the class-room, we were just waiting to get it.
Whether it’s small medium or large doorframe units, we are just our-selves small medium or large discrete units.
It took us as long as spendthrifts to surmise the ordering limit and the ordering timeline for our weekly bulking of resources.
If you fall asleep now, there will be direct measures of abeyance, cheek to cheek.
Interpolated in this trap of menace, patient forms surround us.
If you fall asleep now on the wooden board in the abbey, you will wake up on the waterbed, not foam, not material that’s astronomical.
Our recognition of time that we can live twice as long and still have ten more years to go fulfills a similar corporal measure.
The module is catching up for the administrators of the module have increased budget allotment and inappropriate sexual relations time.
It is unclear whether they have any real investment in the project or whether it’s just a matter of proving that they’ve managed to finally catch up to taxable matter.
Everyone is busy these days and one of us occupying the soap box gets more airplay than the rest of us though there is less overall hub-bub.
At no point do these points of meridian criss cross although we would desperately wish for them to run amok, in a plain way.
What will we even do with this information besides attend to it.
We are pleasantly retrieved and boggled that the chart cannot with-stand a tautology quite as anecdotal.
When we first arrived, we had it marked on our charts to visit the tombs of the elders.
When we first arrived, we had it marked vaguely on our charts and then we crossed it out in one productive counterintuitive weekend.
Now one of us wants to get credit for planning again the next visit.
We take a picture of the next flowers next to the tombs.
We clear off some dirt from the tombs.
We send the picture of the tomb and we are approved.
—
Valerie Hsiung is a poet, interdisciplinary artist, and the author of several poetry and hybrid writing collections, including The only name we can call it now is not its only name (Counterpath, forthcoming 2023), To love an artist, selected by Renee Gladman for the 2021 Essay Press Book Prize, outside voices, please, selected for the 2019 CSU Open Book Prize, Name Date of Birth Emergency Contact (The Gleaners, 2020), YOU & ME FOREVER (Action Books, 2020), and e f g (Action Books, 2016). Her writing has appeared in print (Annulet, BathHouse Journal, The Believer, Chicago Review, New Delta Review), in flesh (Treefort Music Festival, Common Area Maintenance, The Poetry Project), in sound waves (Montez Press Radio, Hyle Greece), and other forms of particulate matter. Her work has been supported by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, PEN America, Lighthouse Works, and public streets and trails she has walked on and hummed along for years. Born in the Year of the Earth Snake and raised by Chinese-Taiwanese immigrants in Cincinnati, Ohio, she now lives in the mountains of Colorado where she teaches at Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.