YOUR GEOMETRY IS SO APPARENT by Jessica Alexander & Vi Khi Nao

Your Geometry Is So Apparent

by Jessica Alexander & Vi Khi Nao

hush · issue 3

Page 1 of Your Geometry Is So Apparent by Vi Khi Nao and Jessica Alexander. A high-contrast photograph of an abandoned industrial building: tall concrete walls, fire escapes, power lines crossing the frame diagonally, and a single window glowing red-orange. Text is overlaid in the lower left of the image and reads: Tomorrow we will wake again. You, in the early morning before the sun has risen. You zip your trim torso into a coat and raise the collar against the cold. The grass is slick with sleep and you wait in it for the Uber. The dexterity and certainty of your hands holding an avocado. Take your time. There is more of it.
Page 2 of Your Geometry Is So Apparent by Vi Khi Nao and Jessica Alexander. A blue-filtered photograph of an urban street at dusk: signs for RIDE and CROSSFIT are visible, power lines cross the frame, and a colorful mural on the right features abstract figures and the text Colorado Strong. Text is overlaid in white on the upper left and reads: You were lost in the documentation of our changing faces. You showed me a photograph of you in a yellow dress. Your hair was almost amber. The sun shone through the cracks in a splintered barn wall. And I wondered who took it and was there another one of you rushing through trees whose inflorescent descent captured the engine of life rowing its boat. Its oars were wooden and muscular like your back when you crawled across that white desert years ago for a lover whose love bifurcated in a bathtub.
Page 3 of Your Geometry Is So Apparent by Vi Khi Nao and Jessica Alexander. A high-contrast photograph of massive industrial grain silos and cylindrical concrete storage towers against a vivid blue sky, with smaller industrial structures to the left. Text is overlaid in light blue on the upper left and reads: At the grocery store, I caressed a pear, then an avocado, then the vulnerable, lush head of the cabbage and thought of you. Of your exposed clavicle while you were shaking the strainer with the noodle in it and how much I wanted to devour you, run my tongue through your defenseless banana-shaped earlobe, and pull you into me.
Page 4 of Your Geometry Is So Apparent by Vi Khi Nao and Jessica Alexander. A psychedelic thermal close-up of a closed eye with long lashes rendered in heat-map colors—reds, yellows, and oranges with teal accents against black. The image is deliberately blurred and abstracted, making the text overlaid across it partially illegible. Upper left text, partially obscured by the image: And, even my dreams [text obscured by image] ...ing that appears slippery and gray like a fish beating its [obscured] head and [obscured] a plank of wood. Sometimes, I’d feel like Didion, wh[obscured] her car [obscured] some California mountain. In the summer heat, I star[obscured] running, [obscured] wind and breeze, I’d touch my eyes and discover I’d been [obscured]. Lower right text in orange, more legible: Mid-morning, mid-orgasm, it happened again. You clasped me hard with your arms and legs, and I sobbed into your neck and you sang me the strangest song I’d ever heard and I could not understand the words though my breathing slowed and my grief folded like an umbrella into your chest. of a closed eye with long lashes rendered in thermal colors: reds, yellows, and oranges with teal accents against a black background. Two passages of text are overlaid. Upper left, partially obscured by the image: And, even my dreams [text obscured] ...ing that appears slippery and gray like a fish beating its [obscured] head and [obscured] a plank of wood. Sometimes, I'd feel like Didion, wh[obscured] her car [obscured] some California mountain. In the summer heat, I star[obscured] running, [obscured] wind and breeze, I'd touch my eyes and discover I'd been [obscured]. Lower right in orange: Mid-morning, mid-orgasm, it happened again. You clasped me hard with your arms and legs, and I sobbed into your neck and you sang me the strangest song I'd ever heard and I could not understand the words though my breathing slowed and my grief folded like an umbrella into your chest.

Jessica Alexander & Vi Khi Nao

Jessica Alexander's novella, None of This Is an Invitation (co-written with Katie Jean Shinkle) is forthcoming from Astrophil Press. Her story collection, Dear Enemy, was the winning manuscript in the 2016 Subito Prose Contest. Her fiction has been published in journals such as Fence, Black Warrior Review, PANK, Denver Quarterly, The Collagist, and DIAGRAM. She lives in Louisiana where she teaches creative writing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Vi Khi Nao VI KHI NAO is the author of six poetry collections: Fish Carcass (Black Sun Lit, 2022), A Bell Curve Is A Pregnant Straight Line (11:11 Press, 2021), Human Tetris (11:11 Press, 2019), Sheep Machine (Black Sun Lit, 2018), Umbilical Hospital (Press 1913, 2017), The Old Philosopher (winner of the Nightboat Prize for 2014), & of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture (winner of the 2016 FC2's Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize), the novel, Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016). She was the Fall 2019 fellow at the Black Mountain Institute: vikhinao.com