KEEP PLANNING – Finnegan Bly

Forgetting a Week in Brooklyn memory breaking out of. incoherence. with the collision of the floor with a plate with my eye and a honey bee. in ruins, for sweeping (dry). I jostled, I panicked, I regret that. with blossoms holding bags of groceries. and placing them gently on the laminate. kitchen floor for put-away. door-tight, lockscreens I close read upright and idle across the table. with spiral engravings and (a pendulum?) of some kind. for worship (clouds, a dragon, a writing system for spirits) with water damage from stomping human erosion (perhaps riotous joy or destruction) though I wouldn’t call them mutually. exclusive as the syntax implies in the shape of a peach. holding with the fiber of its flesh hairs. its small seed, orange eclipsing. Aura All I wanted was I love you. The mirror engraved on the reflective side no reflection. Friction lost likeness to time: ocean compressed and revised to fresh lake. Against tangle, barrage: a shot giraffe crawling out of its own pain. VHS lines make an aura of memory. Somewhere I've never been before, cleanly, the software cleaves the stranger from the photo background, stretches the landscape color across the absence: a smear of resolution, a fingerprint in pixel, figured in the shape of a bowl with temporal hyacinth engravings , ( 1977 - Inside, I grasp grammar how weather moods day. Ongoing lip to the chipped edge, blue petal. Brass, gunpowder, charcoal, far-off silver, pitter-patter, wax, oil, almost peaceful pastels on canvas with tracks laid and mountains razed by warfare. The air feels collision, my ear interprets it. I penetrate myself. I house atrophied muscle, collapsing distinctions between opened and closed. The flesh is dead and cannot remember its former form. You do not appear in personal objects: splayed bristles on toothbrush. I painted a window with soap suds. Felt heat creeping from the air outside. You touched me without touching me. Drought Season I stopped talking for aircraft engines my head turned towards contrails it was an ad for payday loans followed by fighter jets partitioning white words a city makes in San Diego I go missing watching a confluence of La Jolla rock doves organized into organism my memory mimics the behavior of dusk bats rising over mountain how rural bleeds rust wound degrading the boundary held by sky my father pools rain and fossil into mouth I didn't know I was memorizing with my head turned towards ground addressed to his single point for minutes spraying poison at the dirt edge a figure painting of a felled orchard dragged and disced my dog's wrapping nerves in wires under my parents' bed even this is a place laid to rest her webbed feet under yellow rose and drought while my redacted blood unmoored returned to sender and returned again kicking I can only place love from a distance like my mother who never returned home the ground reflecting her face during her morning smoke a rainbow oil in the rare rain

***_____ Finnegan Bly is a queer, Korean-American writer from rural Northern California. Their work appears in Grist, mercury firs, Shō Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. They are an MFA candidate at Louisiana State University. 30 September 2026