Silver Cascade Catskill Clove c. 1861 by Snapshots of the Past

wondering if you ever stopped and actually looked at yourself. studied which way your blood flowed, and what swam upstream in it. salmon days. hippocratic shit. i tend to romanticize, i know, these types of mountainsides. i dwell in the visceral and the rest stop trucker smokers. i don’t look to see what parts of the cornea have cracked in this arid month. i never studied anatomy. i am wondering if you ever did. i want to know how limb glue works, and how to heal finger scabs. i don’t mean to eulogize, but place death feels realer than people death.

if a run down hotel could speak it would cough up a hairball before the oooohhhh emerged from its curtain lips. dying moan, orgasmic. unlittle. this was not a zero sum game, i don’t believe. we’ve sung here, upstream sounds. oooohhh.

we are five kids in a town of chasidim. hats on walls, coming down from the forests, coming out from the earthquake tents, coming up from the backwards streams, salmon days. if only we could be curbed from the stretch settle, the chunk of highway between harriman and mawah, where bodies grow heavy with the clouds. do you have the science for that? the rain link? sludge stream.

we will become the crawl. fall apart, things. look in the river mirror with your cornea scrapes. what do you see?

In all the years of searching through Craigslist’s Missed Connections, I only found one poetry post from the Catskills forum. It’s a very quiet feed and I think most people post to either Hudson Valley or Albany as they’re geographically close. This message escaped the censors over the July 4th holiday, and that’s a good enough reason for saving it. Plus, I agree that place death feels realer than people death.