MY FAVORITE THINGS              for Losarc Raal

The checkerboard teakettle burned my mother with its green jade handle. She’s since lost her ability to whistle. Beneath the kettle I keep the diamond grating that covers the burners to prevent it from touching the stove directly. Nevertheless, flames shoot up the sides of the kettle as it heats. I never put any water in there.

Mother cannot seem to predict what I’m going to do next. Above the ivory ironing-board, with long and toothy knife aloft, I occasionally cut open snails. The knife has an ebony handle depicting the parting of the Red Sea. Something so finely made is never in search of metaphors. The adze mail opener has gone missing. The blade of a breadknife restores missing teeth.

What cuts also knits and so on. The chamois oven mitt is pulled from its shagreen purse and thus armed one might handle the radiant green glass of deviled egg trays. From an identical but smaller purse remove the onyx corn-holders with vermeil prongs. Any statement holds truth in potential throughout its debut. Corn-holders in sport-coat pocket, time to move egg trays from cupboard a to cupboard b.

Details plentiful but not much total effect. The room itself is practically a priori, fake ruins built onto the open fields to be like us, skeletal remains without their planner, fancy moulding with sail-ships, or giant snails, or what do you imagine. I beg Haley to find the light switches or turn on the fan.

Grab that zebra-wood hatrack tree with its pale tin umbrella stand, grab her by the neck and drag her with you. We’ve got to get to the dining room. Is there more than one room? We’re sleeping through a lecture on function. I never eat, I never agreed to see my mother naked, totally laid out and exposed. We tried to get our parking validated and our bodies crumbled in the air.

The knobbed bone handle to the teacart is festooned with strings of dental-floss. Loss haunts me, the loss of my family members least of all, the loss of recent memories the most. Peanut shells litter the moroccan rugs. Nowhere can one discover the Hudson half-dollar, though it once bounded through here.

Polka-dots are pompous, and so are jeans, fit only for the ghosts that come at me. It’s another birthday celebration for patterns themselves.

The green tin flour box with its jolly white handle – god I love handles, my house is nothing but handles – is barely discernible behind the dark green glass of the cabinet handles that hide the past from the present, or that watch us fuck on the wall like shadows attended only by sandstone glyphs of geography and native flora. Grip them by their necks and trail bustily around, utterly alone aside from the occasional glint of an eye in the glazed handles and knobs before they return to something resembling a pumpkin or a smaller pumpkin.

After securing the glass wands in their narrow carafe I lifted them onto the darkened chinoiserie of the tea-caddy, its burnished bronze corners of Empire State Buildings agleam beneath an assortment of small suns. The tea-cart, sunken somewhat into the dense carpets and parked into place by extra drawer-pulls, needs to be rocked gently to escape the rut it’s made. Our glass bones chime and shiver. Better this than a sudden lurch. We call it lunch. The wands twinkle as a study of contemporaneity, while knobs darkened with mirth observe their enthusiasm.

A beryl plopped into the carafe and cracked it like a forest between centuries of being ignored. Searingly emotional peeper. Sewing together the upper parts and the parted bead-curtain of the lower-parts has you feeling miserable, but better.