All right.
Next person craving intimacy come forth.
Hi, what's your name.
My name is Beth.
Hey, Beth.
And I was a Hawaiian shirt designer.
No way.
And I know what--
her name is Lehua and it's a beautiful flower.
I was a Hawaiian shirt designer and I
sat here looking at her [? hibiscus ?] the whole time
thinking, why isn't a lehua flower on her?
I am the lehua flower.
[LAUGHTER]
All right.
Tell us about creating the illusion of love with words
transoceanic.
OK.
You want to talk about this first?
This intimacy, this physical intimacy?
As a shirt designer, the intimate thing I want to do
is look at the tag on your shirt.
[LAUGHTER]
Oh, here we go.
Am I choking you?
No.
[LAUGHTER]
It's all good, Beth.
[LAUGHTER]
It says wild fang.
Hey.
[LAUGHTER]
Beth goes divulging secrets.
[LAUGHTER]
All right.
Tell us about creating the illusion of love with words
transoceanic.
Number 97.
So I have my heart broken real bad, like terrible bad.
Like worse than you thought could happen ever and then like
nobody knows how bad that hurts.
That's still true.
Like you don't know how bad it hurts
even though it was like 15 years ago still the worst pain ever.
And then I broke up with the love
and then I moved across the country again.
And my dog died the day I got home.
Not a country music song actually happened.
And then a month after that I broke my leg.
So I was stuck in this town I didn't want to be in.
Something that came my way was an unexpected pen pal
ship with a beautiful woman.
And I'd hurt so bad that I made it into love.
This is someone I had never met but we exchanged letters.
Estuary.
Something like love found me.
I did not tell anyone or I did but the words
turned to birdsong on my tongue.
Her name, when the body cannot contain the heart.
An estuary carries letters, lovely script,
trailing sinuous, backlit and blue pulse.
The feathered word that hums about us, between us
is unmoored, what we share.
Roots of the air.
My name, the flower.
Half this, half that.
The great sea has set me in motion, set me adrift,
moving me like a weed in the Brine river.
I have the letters.
Our names both exchanged for the sake of our grandmothers.
We could not take up their tongues
because their song is part of what we have lost.
Weeping bloom with out.
Here's what the letters contain.
Boats, oceans, currents, moons, flowers, nests.
Unnamed shades of love.
We are soil less too, Taitano.
She reached across the map said a bloom,
adrift on the surf to wish my healing.
In the bed for weeks mine snapped me
like a misshapen breadfruit.
I lulled in a light-less chasm, all the while wielding
a string of petals to and fro from my chest.
The longest lay seeking her across oceans
and did it find her.
She says my name is everywhere she looks.
Little red flowers, rare, yellow, both and blossoms,
street signs, the stars, the ocean.
The green, green trees, winged things, flowers, Earth, sky,
rain.
Her name is everywhere I close my eyes.
The upward welling when the heart persists.
How can you miss what you have never held?
I have seen her only in pictures.
Something about her eyes, my last love, her mouth.
And dreams I construct a lover of parts.
She sees, she sings.
But one cannot chance the bird.
In dreams I have everything.
In my palms, the bird, the pin feather dust.
The have not breathing is one.
In dreams I am the flower me, all flesh and nectar,
the bees humming in my cheeks.