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A heavy spooning of mashed avocado dusted with black pepper and red pepper flakes and topped with a crumbling of feta cheese; most avocado toasts are typically presented open-faced, however this one features itself with two half-sandwiches on a plate, globs of avocado floored and roofed by frail slices of panini-pressed toast.

One may think that avocado toast is a difficult dish to get wrong. After all, both ingredients intrinsic to the dish are featured in its name. However, many underestimate the power of sheer hubris! Too many a restaurant fall prey to tweaking what is such a simple dish until it is unrecognizable; and when I am in a hot, trendy area like Coconut grove and ask for an avocado toast, there's really no telling what kind of deconstructed orientation of the meal I am about to be served.

These frail, buttered toasts would pair nicely with some cafe con leche, but quite honestly are completely overwhelmed by the pile of guacamole. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to cut pieces or eat it like a sandwich; but both options are difficult on this moist, anemic bread.

I feel it within myself//bubbling under the surface//buzzing at the tips of my fingers// a lightness that isn't lightness//a cracking in my chest//a growing// a coming apart//curling up//where the dust//collects itself//my knees//cradle my chest//and render me//in supplication//to whatever will hold me together//nothing is left to bind me//and the pieces goo//and weep//as they pull apart//in memory//of the glue.

it's been raining ever since you left. On and off, but it's almost always gray. Without warning, it's pouring and the streets are dappled and moving and cars hush themselves along and our windows are pointillized; bedazzled in glass marbles and miniature and it's thundering and i'm wondering x

winter trudges on and I find myself aching for rebirth. morning comes and I am awake, and it's cold and my cherry-red nails have devolved into chipped paint on a tugboat -- artifacted by negative shape and asymmetrically cut keratin at every odd angle. Back home, I know my room sits, a mess in the twilight of x's funeral and the migration of x it caused. the dishes sit steeped in brine, about a foot from xxx I left to stew this morning, too busy holding a grudge against my wakefulness. these past few days I've moved slow and sleepy, both characteristics I'd attribute to the cold itself as it puts the old year to bed -- yet here iam, ten days into twenty-twenty five still bleary-eyed and blinking. I know I need direction. I've spent too long at this job without proper goals in mind other than finding a car. But thinking is hard in this winter, feeling almost so.

as the seasons change,

i steep in the swirling colors

wilting, blooming, ripening

after my death

now i am heavy with bloom

and fruit

i'd forgotten how sweet

i'd forgotten how sour.

_

how curious, to come alive when the world dies;

when the chill renders my lungs sterile

every clear wind is a huff of paint

and my digits forget how to bend

and gnarled hands carve out a cloudless sky

_

how curious, to drown in becoming;

scorching, soupy breaths and seeding dusts that swell the throat

suspend me in honey and liquid sugar

dilute and breathless

dream on 10/22

disturbing dreams like clouds part and I am gaspingly awake

ready to start my day under pregnant circumstances most macabre

I killed a man

with my bare hands

and now i must

get out of bed