If only we could fly like they do—things that I cannot imagine, all things platinum, women in clothes that I designed in a dream, comfort without itch, no kings above me, all threads where they should be, no loops to catch a fingernail on, nothing to snag—if we could do this, there would be nothing to talk about. All things lovely, simply: a rose on a white pedestal, a sun through clouds, a blanket neatly folded on an edge of a bed freshly made.
I sleep well here. The awkward necks, the sterile things, the individually wrapped nothings, their Here you are’s when there is no context for location, no markings to give you pause, no feeling of speed. All is small and inviting: the trees like upside down bottles, fat in their greenness. Roll them around your tongue like an ice cube, melt them against the inside of your cheek—soothe the raised white lines from when you bit down too hard—the places I wish you would never find on warm nights—how embarrassed I would be to be that clumsy: that something that simple could be botched, that sometimes I press my thumb to the wound and it comes out a watered-down pink, that the regret here is instant and fast-moving.
My room can never get as cold as the glass—it is hotter than the inside of mouths, skin sticking to something I’ll never see, my tongue split into ridges from the dryness. Why would you ever want any of this—this heat, this realness, this idea that when the plane lands you will be away from where you were: that you can wake up somewhere.
The quiet hum of this place does not exist, this ideal love, this future of travel, this future of sleep. The story goes like this: what is better than what is better than this and if can we imagine it: our hands in the air, the wings made of you, the taste of sky on our palates.
Brian Oliu is from New Jersey and lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. His collection of Tuscaloosa Missed Connections, So You Know It's Me, was released in 2011 by Tiny Hardcore Press. His lyric essays based off of videogame boss battles, Level End, was released in 2012 by Origami Zoo Press.
