☀ Today's Poem: "Reading Karen Barad on a Saturday Afternoon" Kazim Ali

A man with the body of my twenty-five-years-ago boyfriend comments on one of my pics with a flirty emoji: a smiley face blowing a kiss
It's enough to make me a little weak by memory if not actuality—we've never met

Though I imagine my mouth closed on his stomach, my arms around his hips, the kiss already finished and me just lingering there, breathing, he laughs and complains I'm tickling him, I grab him tighter
The clocks stopped in Hiroshima at 8:15 and time itself was destroyed, the physicist explains, so is that why I too am caught in three/four/five times at once
Across the street my neighbor is using a leaf blower to push—what? dirt? dust? there are not a whole lot of fallen leaves in California, not really, even in the autumn—debris of some kind out of his graveled yard and onto the driveway
Am I still hovering in time between this day and one twenty-five years ago, governed by his stomach on mine for the last time, he enters me the way a virus might and hides deep in protein chains
First my neighbor blows the debris from the beds, then he sweeps it into neat piles to collect and dispose
From the east smoke from the wildfires is supposedly blowing in but I can't smell anything
In the early days of the governor's shelter-in-place order I wrote to the old boyfriend just to say I hoped he was all right but he never answered and then he blocked me from being able to write again
A pomegranate hanging on the fecund bush in the curb lawn, split open on the branch, means ethically it is fair game for picking
And if I pick it and pluck six seeds and eat them does that mean I can enter the underworld again of a body of flesh upon another body of flesh, oh like the masseur who at the end of a divine hour of work in which my body opened in every way under his hands muttered to himself in the perfumed dark, "fuck it" and dumped the rest of the oil onto my skin and then climbed up onto the table and slid himself over me
The wind after a heatwave carries me across time and miles to other places—August in the Mediterranean highlands, December on the Arabian Sea, January on a beach east of Montevideo
Even my words slip between Arabic, Castellano, Urdu, Malayalam and whatever else claims my brain
Is it all still inside
Is he still inside me
I he you still inside me
And the man in the picture, slim on the beach, recognizable to me
Oiled bodies move against one another the way on the shore of the Arabian I was translating poetry from one language into another
Atalanta had never known another human and so she didn't know in the wrestling match where her body ended and the man's began
I always plagiarize my own essays and poems, stealing images and whole lines not for some theoretical comment on originality or ownership but because I have no sense of time or boundary between bodies
The Kazim then might be stealing from the Kazim now, so often do I write not knowing what a line even means and only many years later having lived do I half-know
When my mother passed away—suddenly, unexpectedly, she hadn't been ill—I wrote again to the old lover, since he knew her, I wanted him to know but nothing came back, a silence deeper than silence
Sent back in time by a little feint back in time to a lover known then and not now or known and not then
At a distance of twenty-five years, standing on a beach when the ocean, what's endless, meets shore
A text or body moving from one language in my mouth to another, each just what's clawed from land to sand or what's brought up out of the blue well into air
I held the six seeds in my hand thinking if I eat them would I be fastened or would I be thrown
After all the Kazim that existed before his mother left the world is dead now too, and this person living in my body now is someone new, someone who doesn't know who he is
Hands on my body what I forgot and what I could never forget or remember because it is all my life at once
The sounds of the leaf blower and in days of fire and distance the old lover the new one the two Kazims does not one at once know many lives