Breonna Krafft
Letter

Love, let’s transfigure the world together. I will tuck tubes of matte acrylic into the waist of my jeans, fill my back pockets with various brushes, their horse hair bristles rustling against the unraveling hem of my t-shirt. You can keep rolls of 120 in a light-proof bag at the bottom of your satchel, Diana waiting for you to hold her shutter open long enough for light to ambush the silver halide, leave its mark. I can be Ayutthaya and after they burn me, you can sift the beauty from the soot; capture me in sepia and set me free.

 

Let’s cull the seeds from pomegranates and stain our cuticles; call each other’s names through tin cans and watch the small reverberations; crawl into caves then out again to remember how surprising light can be. I see my salvation, love, and it lies in tempera and in film.
 

 

Letter

You hear the vibrato in my staccato but you don’t know how to listen. Remember the cacophony of bees, their buzzing, when we stumbled into the tree-host of their hive? I peeled back the bark to try and suck the sap and you yelled that you were allergic. I couldn’t hear you, stuck under their drone. I consumed no syrup and you got away unstung. How do you feel? Only now are we drowning in bees.
 

 

Letter

Today I was in a bar and the smoke seared my eyes and saturated my clothes, smothered each clean pore and filled it with tar. It made me miss Massachusetts, the days we went to shows and danced with the space restricting our bodies, pressing us against others. We went home and sat, our hands or legs or sometimes mouths touching either incidentally or purposely. I shaved my legs expectantly, but when your fingers brushed my skin you didn’t notice anyway.

 

In the background the television droned and the SVU detectives solved another case. The victims were never survivors, though, folding onto and into themselves, wearing brand new Reeboks under their bed sheets at night. I was never alone with you, but rather alone with them, like them, waiting for you to reveal yourself as the city’s head pounded into migraine behind us.

 
 

 

Letter

I’m writing to you, again. I don’t expect you’ll answer. Today I saw a man with nuclear hair. It reminded me of the sunset we watched over the Pacific. The waves toppled into one another, their foamy crests forming and reuniting then forming again. I curled my toes into the wet sand and then I noticed the jellyfish: dead, translucent and washed to shore. They’re so beautiful when they’re alive, tiny fractals diffusing whatever light can fight through the waves to reach their bodies. But they’re mostly water. Dead, it was almost unrecognizable: tentacles splayed out from its gelatinous body, fanning the sand. You didn’t see it. You didn’t feel like looking.
 

 

Letter
 

I scratched out your face in all of my photographs and now I can’t remember what you look like. Your body remains, arms slung around my waist as if you thought you could hold me there. How long can it be since I felt the calluses on your fingertips graze my imperfections?

 

Today a bird flew into the window, smashed its skull against the glass and fell to the ground. Black eyes stared at me over its cracked coal beak and something lurched in me. What it must be like to crash into nothing with only sky ahead.

 

Sometimes when I erased you I missed an eye or ear or chin. I cut out each of the left behind and created a mosaic of you, but I couldn’t tell the cracks from your scars. It wasn’t the same. I scooped up the remnants of you, took two straight pins and stuck your eyes onto the bird’s. As you stared up at the sky I scattered the confetti you into the wind. Pieces of you stuck to the window where oil or blood or both was left behind.