This piece was first published in Quarto’s 2023 Spring Print Edition.
Illustration by Kaavya Gnanam
It’s a drag on history or philosophy, maybe.
After 11 minutes the movie is discarded. Film critics weep!
The jewel of my mind is no piece of theory.
Some weeks I direct Hamlet and you rewrite the Bible,
and some weeks we fuck into the night and miss our trains.
I mean not to be crude but rather to be vulgar,
to speak in my home tongue. Mornings were silent.
Perhaps if we could dissect a human soul
like a pig fetus, we could quit our jobs, be light-dependent.
I press us towards curiosity while you struggle
through atmospheric reentry, flipping pennies,
always paying close attention to entropy and unraveling thus.
Always trending earthward, restless with superstition.
On some griping Tuesday: a line of questioning advanced.
It marches on foreign territory with champagne.
Is there love without distance or beauty without death?
Can I name you without killing you? There is pain too,
in what’s for dinner tomorrow, in domestic fantasy.
If every word is a blood money diamond,
then we are lost, thinking the same thoughts
on different frequencies, still kissing through the morning
but never letting light through the blinds. No machine
operates with complete efficiency, and every I love you
must burn some meaning off into heat.
Though, I hope, that phrase less than others.
They fight wars on every street corner, yet we
wait for the mail. Drive to the shore. We could elope even,
were we less saturated with urban sediment.
It is our fault, for believing there are still codes to crack.
We could pave roads, were we not creatures of sentiment.
Charlie Coleman (he/they) is a junior at Barnard studying English and philosophy. His work has previously been published in ANGLES, ZENIADA, and The Sandy River Review—he is also delighted to be published in Quarto again! They are passionate about new wave films, love letters, kitchen sink dramas, film photography, 60s music, and long walks around the city.