Excerpt from The Encounter Project

1

She keeps her eye on the compass and does everything opposite. I want to bolt the door before we speak in her cadence, and I think: how strange, it’s too strange that I’m alone. She tells me to knock it off. Quit reducing our encounter to a bad reproduction. Streaks and misprints. I eye her heavy heavy latticework framing the constitution of her body, while she puts her foot down saying, damn this surface. We enclose ourselves in thick deterioration. We gradually decrease.

[I want to scale my
own voice, my tacit
turns. I want to select
responses, to stutter.]

The idea of a future creates a thin arch of black. Baaz-e waqht ha fkr meykonam ke zendegiam asan tar namesha, but rather it will continue to open and shut, open and shut like a gol blooming out of order. I invest. I shrink and expand. I consider getting my head back on straight.

2

We stand there, guarded, ba khatere appearances are misleading. My body slopes toward hers despite the level ground. I shutter forward as though contact would gain me access to the darkness of invisibility, no not that, something else, something structurally intact. Silhouettes visible, surfaces visible, and she herself visibly dusty. We echo back in order to figure out where we are. Our bodies are lost in contention, I mean content. Meykhayam barrish yak zendegi e behtar bekheram, ama baaz-e waqht ha faramossh konam ke ma capitalist nastam. A void appears and betrays me.

My attention to elsewhere is too inwardly inflected and thus lacks the force necessary to extend beyond the space I occupy.

She comes to our collision with not much.

Not much interest in the fine contexture of my sentence.

3

Sadaaye besyar maqbol daara, ama oo har waqht hamoosh ast. I grab her bony shoulders and shake and shake, gub bezan, chize bugo! She retaliates, pinches my neck, and twists. Naish nazan. Mara baqarar ban. Buro shoma! I step back, and watch her body join itself, mineralizing. Nafahmidam, chirah oo nadidi ke we require spatial conditions.

I’m tired of watching deliberate acts made to appear incidental.

She laughs at me and says: your body is an incident standing there with your arms out. We consume it. We metabolize its hue.

And so I shut my mouth.

And so I consider the curve, the single movement of my arm and her deep red that has nothing to do with it.

Our axis slightly off-color, blushing.

Da ee roz ha ma ra hech khawb nameybarrad. I feel like a verb conjugated in another tongue. She looked at me oddly and said she thought she saw something beautiful below my face. A line of demarcation and a line between flesh, which is a type of insistence that we speak with punctuation. We encounter ourselves, we smile with a certain amnesia.