Call and no response
I will not call you candy
Or I will not call you destroy
I will not call you immer
Or I will not call you jamais
You are not argyle and rope
You are more slub and taste
You are each book in the endless library after
hours when the checkout desk is closed
When the checkout desk is
closed you are not
molecular and someday
You are not the scent of burning cream
You are the olive pit I search for in another woman’s mouth
In a land of green you are persimmon
In a persimmon of land you are sugar rising
And the olive pit I search for in another woman’s mouth is a library
And the library does not ask
They ask me what they should call you
No they demand—
I say it depends on the fabric
I say it depends on when jamais comes
They like their shiny keys and they like them always
I don’t care much for little prisons;
I do not relish the sexual nature of unlocking
—the insertion of hard metal things into slick places—
The subsequent releases through forces of will
They want to call you things
I say it depends on the key
If the key is shiny the answer is silence
If the key is intricate the answer is silence
If the key is mine the answer is silence
If the key is jamais the answer is I will whisper into your ear like a woman’s
mouth whispers in a
library when she has forgotten the
meaning of all the
words in all the whispering books when she has forgotten the
meaning of
whisper
Movement across an invisible barrier
How you come to bed damp,
bring the place where you were to the place where you are
The way your hair carries stories,
tiny grains of sand
How the five small moles on your stomach
form a constellation
How the moon is a mirror
How something with no doors
can be entered
How you are your own horizon
How you breathe
beneath the sea of sleep
Philosophy for darling
If you were a seahorse you’d
be loyal but you’re a man
so perhaps it is not your fault
you like to breathe air perhaps
it is the dry dry oxygen making you
thirsty for what you can’t
have if you could breathe
water you wouldn’t need
mermaids if you were a
fish I’d always be finding you
flopping around on the carpet not
making your grand escape but
just seeing what it felt like to rub
up against the synthetic beauty of soft
strands for feet you didn’t have if
you had feet you wouldn’t need to
escape you see I see it all so
clearly you see your reflection
in your little glass bowl you see
with the perfection of one eye on
one side of a flattened
head there are two sides to
everything you would say if
you said such things
if you were a man
and not a flippery creature
if I weren’t so busy cleaning up
the wet tracks on the floor
if I were even
listening.
Which begins as a color unless it begins
as a sound: we didn’t know what it was exactly
but it was weeping.
We both agreed about that— the fact that it was
weeping. And I agreed that it was
beautiful and you agreed that it was
nameless and after an hour had passed you
decided it must come from
Japan and I agreed that it must come from
somewhere because only the weeping
would have been here before.
And it fell like stars.
In the manner of a star falling.
In the manner of a thing which begins
so it has a beginning but now it is on fire
and we will only ever know it for
its otherness. Or we will never know it.
Because once a thing falls then
the torn space remaining— then
where it is going to go— 
Frankie Drayus is a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing at New York University, where she was poetry editor for Washington Square. Her poems and short-short fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Third Coast, VOX, Poemeleon, Passages North (Finalist, Just Desserts Short Fiction Contest), and Barrow Street. Her manuscript was chosen as a finalist for the 2007 May Swenson Poetry Award. She currently lives in Los Angeles.
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