from “Fuel”
Rosie Stockton | Fuel | Nightboat Books | May 2025 | 88 Pages
Dear End,
My fall
for you is prelapsarian.
Every time I leave our dream, I am under attack.
It isn’t my death they want, it is just to be inside.
It is only under a new moon I learn to take you seriously.
I leave my bed unmade, I show up late for work.
We could be many things – I could give it up,
I could tell you exactly what to do.
Shut up and shut down, baby birding communion,
transubstantiate your little joke.
Let the tips of our boots touch,
stack our books on top of one another.
I memorize your schedule. Your metaphysics rule
my circadian rhythms, my bowel movements.
I have remained committed to our private bacchanal,
left the cobwebs intact, so the breeze has something to touch,
chaotic in absent moonlight.
It softens me, it blurs my drive.
You said keep going and I kept going
long after you looked away,
Dear End,
Like I promised, I haven’t lied
nor told a single truth in weeks.
You said truth can no longer be the operative framework
between us, if we are to witness each other rightly.
My only touchable fact is a frozen
dream seamed out to consummate
my waxing moon, that took the pomegranate
out of my body for one vertiginous minute.
But only you know that,
how my fingers roll each jewel from its rind.
I took your name to the bath, I took your name on a walk,
I smashed your name in the toilet.
I offered it to city infrastructure.
An expression of my devotion.
Ritual induces rupture. I cultivate weeds,
I tend our security. I am waiting, weighing
your technique in my mouth, attention
hovering over the slabbed concrete.
The previous tenant’s curtains
block your light from my eye.
In wanting you, all becomes you.
Midnight wraps around us,
when we can finally be together—
our horizon exists only in destruction of time,
Dear End,
I keep wishing my own plurality,
but get hailed back in this self.
My dreams make their own ending for love.
I could always keep going without you.
I told you, you can feel it if you want to—
everything that’s ever happened—
Only then can we be governed rightly—
where metaphor becomes transubstantiation.
You’re unresisting, an image of our day.
All things press and clap. Wrapping belt, a clunky suitcase.
Where are you now?
I like not to know, but only to ask.
You play hard to get
only because in our love, there is no having.
Tiny prose, precise scam.
A minor be mine …
Unveiled devastation, if there was anything
to reveal I’d be made of revelations.
I write you in the here and now,
the then and there. It’s fire season again,
growing more sayable each year,
it incites me into this present.
I look for you
until I can’t be more sunk,
Suddenly, and always, there will be
three of everything,
Dear End,
When I look at you it’s rarely with proper grammar.
I dreamed you picked up the entire pew and turned
toward me. You betrayed your pulpit.
My gaze stationed direct,
a holy ghost in the slow deluge of my habit.
Then, you sat silently, to call me out.
You are always looking for some far-off cinderblock to seduce,
to be loyal to by never speaking its name.
I enflesh our difference,
I feel the busy movements of our void.
I don’t want you superimposed; I want
to bridge this filthy yearning.
I feel I have earned this,
your distance, your intimacy.
I undo myself, therefore I am.
I create a theory of noticing you.
I can feel when you think of me,
when our eye lands on the same star.
Some days I get so lonely,
I clean the fridge of our associations.
I destroy our state. I start anew on our braids.
I say my evening prayer: May we slip away unnoticed.
The silences in the archive
are not the silences in heaven,
Dear End,
In this dream I couldn’t hear anything you were saying,
but I knew you were saying something. I woke up laughing.
I am jealous how you can just subtract yourself like that.
I try to expand time as not to feel it. I want total comorbidity with you.
Now, I edge myself because I don’t trust you.
You want to know how your absence is affecting me?
In the dream I couldn’t keep my clothes off.
Every time I rolled over they were back on.
You treat me like a crushed-out trick,
some Utopian simp.
Let’s be practical,
let’s move money together.
We will master laziness,
we will reproduce ourselves exquisitely.
Take loss after loss,
and lose nothing.
Decked out now, you’re raining
down my asphalt.
Infected, possessed, this is how I play our game.
So come on up.
You must want entirely
or not at all,
Dear End,
This is how everyday words become love songs.
I straddle our distance and ride.
I sing a ballad of spores. I climb your heart’s rank.
Stars make me trust light, never having truly arrived.
It is possible to touch without touching –
you know better than anyone,
how to distinguish a relic from what’s at work.
I’m ready to air out my false consciousness, all I covet.
I’m a habituated creature. I always thank my objects,
not as a political horizon, but as an honest feeling.
I set myself in motion.
It’s not that I chase you, it’s that you cause me to chase.
Crass retention, I wave your flags, my true pleasure.
I build barricades in front of my desire, I halt my ruddy poethics.
I cough with hunger for you.
Attaching my dorsal fin to your not knowing.
Refracting daddy, I’ll spend all I’ve got,
pour my debt into your debt’s glass,
Steady loudness, rhythmic collapse. Maniacal
with programmatic visions. Your immanence reigns.
But like you said, the sonnetman
only comes to regulate our futures,