Julia Bloch: A vessel is an image. An image is multiple. The image gets sorted. It feigns order. The vessel tips, sorts itself, but can be neither all things nor all wholes. This is a work of critique and a work of response, and you can’t hold it. So here’s a vessel to contain, add weight, and lift. Spill it all over the floors, a kind of varnish. Slick fumes shut the throat. “Words behave bodily as a sonnet,” say Laney and Bernadette. We would once rehearse the line, “I seek no copy now of life’s first half, and seek and seek.” “But the sonnet is a stupid form,” Bernadette says. “That’s not how anyone really thinks. A sonnet is just another room and words really are our body.” She feels the things she herself owns as a sort of pressure. It’s annoying the way she wants to pull the lyric thought out of it. Not always, but when the mouth gets papered over, there’s just a big, boring silence. Other people’s objects exert no pressure.

Julia Bloch: Patty’s apartment looks maniacal from below. Don’t worry about a spare set of keys, just total their rendition and rearrange the old kitchen into your own story. Pluto doesn’t use a safe word. She died in her bed and that’s all anyone can say about it. Align the bones. Though this building isn’t actually moving, it’s only construction outside. This room isn’t actually moving. It’s breathing. Don’t think about movement.

Julia Bloch: Use the word mirage, because seeing is a form of wanting. When we desire, that desire remain a mirage, which is why the points of color are always moving by, slash, eyes are in dreams. It’s okay because gave up coffee. It’s okay because ate some fake bread. It’s okay because that was dream and this is today.

Julia Bloch: Count lines on paper, on wood, on plastic, on plaster. It’s okay because cramp, no cramp. It’s okay because small slice of brain, not visible but cut, perceptible roof, corner of concrete in the sky, damaging. Just don’t want to do any damage, or at least acute damage, or certainly violence as the building abuts sky.

Julia Bloch: Here’s how one old memory goes. In 1992 or 1993 Minneapolis central library, the slippery escalators, the wet sidewalk from Loring Park to Hennepin Avenue, full of smoke. Maybe this is how long time takes precisely. I clean like my medicine skips. The page, eyeglass is a form of medicine from late menstrual to early ovulation. It’s easier to say the thing unless it isn't one, and one, and two, and seven, and seven, and the face empties.

Julia Bloch: Time is participatory. Timing is actual, whereas other actions are diaphanous. To time is to wait. To see is to make virtual. And to make virtual is to align body with signal to count moons counter-clockwise.

Julia Bloch: Either you get the book or you get the concept, you get the chart or the seam ripper. Both are forms of policing, a feeling that’s right in the thigh. A ritual breaks into steps. Each step produces a result. Each result wins or loses. Each result leads to another step. The steps lock into each other. Total payoff.

Julia Bloch: The word in the salad chewed by coauthors of a future wrapped in fabric. There’s tenderness in naming and tenderness and taking the name away. A name is a lens. A lens keeps something clean and also warps. A lens can start a fire, so don’t bother. What does it mean to take a name away? I've been writing toward this question since 4:30 p.m.

Julia Bloch: Scrutiny as intimacy. A fragrance of knowing. Hold and lick at it like a fruit. What do they mean as misery feminine? Citrine is for work. Maybe a venturing. Heat from the new laptop for the torque sacroiliac joint. Hold it. Can’t have cake, can’t have soda, can’t have beer, can’t have coffee, can’t let availability drip from your earrings. Can’t click open. Can’t suck licorice. Can’t take airplanes. Can’t hear the other one.

Julia Bloch: Mara says, “Pick up your painful reality swords,” and Lorraine says, “Throw things to the flood,” and I am lonely, lonely, lonely. Everyone’s hoarding everything out of the time.

Julia Bloch: Get the lung behind the rib cage. Want is trigger and container. Want is actually a pillar built of natural and synthetic fibers pushing forward from spine to breastbone. “Backbends are good for fear of death,” Ellen says. Breathe into the space behind your rib cage. Put your hands on the pillar and drag your spine down to the floor. See, the pillar won’t move. The room won’t fall. Fourth street hot like a muscle. Pillar props up the spine with a dark piece of plastic behind the kidney. The body in particular, all its animate parts, this red cord between two bodies, one real, one imagined. Imagination is lovely. It all comes down to the thing.