JULY COLUMN, or, ILIA'S POEM

That summer in your Parisian apartment I tried to invent myself

ex-nihilo. Berlant once wrote about how we live life defensively and porously;

tangled up in bedsheets, sun scattering across the tiles of nearby buildings.

 

Do you remember how the doves on the trees postured like white irises?

Or the morning at the bakery when you taught me how to pronounce chouquette.

 

I spent my time walking up and down Place de la Bastille, choking

on diagraphs. Two baguettes erect in my purse. I was anointed with desire

and uncertainty and everything was spectacular this way. 

 

One night, while you cooked dinner–a whole chicken–I leaned over the railing of

your balcony, just enough to dribble spit on the passersby.

A secular prayer to answer your heed.

 

All of my attempts to skirt the unbearable

were enmeshed in the wildness of heat and linden.

 

Still, I attempted anything: limning the Seine,

making a leap between human and language divine—

no dove too delicate to be plucked.