the entire left wall of the living room is glass, pushed back by a mammoth spanish oak. open the window: manic green floods the carpet, flypapers the walls, which are still bare, save the green, the stuff of summer in decline. tell me, please, if there is a way to revert back to rage; degrade this silence into such a state of incoherency, violence is possible. true violence can only occur in broad daylight. i want to be watched. if after twilight—is only terror, the basest form, all reverberation. i seek the purity of present-tense. and fail. the formality of my silence, of “healing”—smoothing my skirt as i sit; the sun, skin light with it. mom calls: in january, the rose bowl. do you know where they keep the floats? my sister: i tried sixteen different wedding dresses; they all made me look fat. the formality, even, of despair. i sweat without producing a scent or any identifiable moisture. i wait every day for the sun to reach high noon: a drunk and stumbling yellow, at the height of its virility, bleaches out the leaves, chapped concrete, light itself.