She smoked a cigarette. Leaning backwards slowly, forwards, rocking to take a sip of her now cold coffee. Her words break, �so what do you think happens after death. When we die. Just sitting lying in the ground.� Someone answers. They�ve know each other for years. She puts out her cigarette and the floor of loose change and dirty carpet. Checkerboard tables jazz music sunsets. �Pass me the ash tray anyways honey, will you.�

She kept creating these coffee scene scenarios in her head � who would be there, what song would be playing, what they would talk about, how deep she�d slice the knife. She looked out the window and sighed. Instead she was here in her apartment looking at fifty stories of new york city unfolding. It�s raining and suddenly everything is italy and chai tea and sweeping change. Piecing together words and photographs for some kind of suburban sanity.

What about this, someone would ask. This late night scrambling for ink and words to justify something, anything greater. �Everyone�s in love and the flowers pick themselves� because she was always stealing everyone else�s lines, but she said it calmly over coffee so it felt real, throwing up words instead of food and bringing rusting poems and memories into the air because it was hardly love. She�s back to influences again, black and white checkerboards floors and windows and socialization that brought us here, running on the page � the words �silent standstill� are important.

Remembering satellite, the road of silver starlight paved black the moon the wind brushing the tops of the buildings and the hotel they�ve been going to for years, the bar and the drinks and the drinks and the drinks, the bartender who started looking different by the end of the night and collisions on side streets leaving shards of silver to cover the night the street black one more time. Only he will take her there and order nothing. She knows what they look like but not how they feel. The girl with starved bones long legs graceful cheekbones. She knows. She sits in a new york flat drinking vodka in one hand, a needle knitting sleep in the other. She she. She pushes the air between them out and her hips are just bones, but what about her mother. Addicted to thin. Her father. Alcoholic. She traces the patterns like she�s reading the obituaries. She�s dead every minute she�s alive.

Months passed and she found herself with him underneath a street lamp; he kept asking questions and she kept lying. Twisted sheets of metal to someone else�s car crash; this is what she wants. Dancing in her tulle and gauze, everything soft like skin, her words in quick fragments and pieces of girl left to rot inside outside on paper. It doesn�t matter anymore he is gone and it doesn�t matter and all she can see is her feet and tulle and angles and she wakes up in a twisted sweat to unfamiliar arms and swollen crevices her hollow hands like photographer�s discards, pinholes sharp like the darts high up in her arm because they alone understood you have to keep your scars hidden.

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