There is no way to simulate not being here.
Umbrella hands on balcony kissing. Sweet
cherry bong. Green gas station in Fort Collins,
rain, carried here.
A dark horse, soft at the edges, lying on the grass.
Suture becomes silence in these recitations of location
(tomorrow a widening field enjambed between red thumbs.)
I heal you with peaches: slices of mandelin
on Tuesday mornings or automatic machine
gun writing, in Italian, when it’s June.
The secret is, there is no thermocline.
It doesn’t exist.
This verb even, soft at the edges,
is a fiery lawn and coca-cola in summer,
69 grams of sugar after noon.
Imagine the atmosphere rolled in
my mind like it rolled over these grasses.
Imagine that, for example,
“if it is said, it exists,”
no wor[l]d more real than these sedimented striations of page.
This winter, Dyllan Moran will be completing his BAs in both Creative Writing and Japanese at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His work has previously appeared in Entropy Magazine, Walkabout Creative Arts Journal, and Journal 2020.