Knitting Myself Into the Algorithm

Knitting Myself Into the Algorithm

Knitting into the Algorithm, into Infinity

Instagram insists on red light therapy, a pink plastic 
eye mask that glows like a ruby-geode inside, 
Zorro illuminated and self-conscious, afraid of 
aging. Each fissure chips at the issue: I am un-
afraid to die. I am just kidding. Death is 
a blind date, sure as Emily’s carriage 
is right on time. My small dog took 
her own ride six months ago, was picked up 
by eternity. Her atoms have a kind of immortality. 
If matter is never created or destroyed, each white 
and orange hair that still sticks in the weave 
of a blue acrylic sweater shows something’s left. 
When I knit and a long dark hair of mine twists 
into the yarn, I keep it there. Let me be littered 
into the future. Let me be threaded into its fabric, 
of something you wrap yourself up in to stay warm.

i have forgotten how to write and all i can do is eat.

powdered french onion soup mix makes potato chip dip. i pretend 
i’ll only eat the curled ones, and then finish the bag anyway. soup 
from last summer with roadside tomatoes from someone else’s 
garden. add frozen, then thawed, then squeezed spinach to every-
thing– green must be good. i am trying to feed everything that is empty. 
remember when i aspired only to wear a whip-cream bikini? to be seen 
as dessert, strategically placed maraschinos glistening. i cannot undo 
these early mythologies. i have tried eating hearts, half-heartedly, 
to feel whole. chicken yakitoried ones at my first bachelorette, 
two hours before a wide bouncer carried me out, and i clung 
to his front like an infant creature. i no longer drink to forget. 
making anyone’s grandma’s recipe is one way to bring back 
the dead. now, it’s the defrosted red cherries and their aftertaste 
of dirt, and ask the piecrust first why dust to dust and not earth to earth?