My name is Podraig Otuma and over the summer I was staying in a place where there was a balcony, a lanai, it was in Maui in Hawaii.

And somebody had said to me that the cardinals like blueberries, so dutifully because I think cardinals are spectacular,

with their red plumage and brown plumage and gorgeousness.

I put some blueberries in a little row on the ledge of the balcony and no cardinals came.

Instead, who came were two cheeky-looking geckles and each of them went and successively licked every single

blueberry and they came back the next day and licked them and I felt like I was wondering what was going to happen

and I used to wait every day to watch these geckos and in a certain sense it probably was only a couple of minutes each time that they did

it. But I felt like time expanded. And my whole day sometimes was centered around waiting for my friends,

the geckos, or the little eyes, to look and to taste the sweetness.

My journal records the vestiture of doppelgangers by Kimberly Blazer.

One. Remember how the loon chick climbs to the mother's back? Oh, checkerboard bed and lifted wing!

Oh, tiny grey passenger who settles, eyes drooping, closed, webbed foot, lifted like a flag.

Each day, each week, I write missives, Mayflies, transparent wings, a stained glass,

fluttering across the surface of lake, an impermanence, imagoes who transform moat, mate, glitter as

splayed bodies on water. I write the red crown, mad V of vulture, wings drying in morning sun.

I record regged squirrel, swimming, yes, swimming across a small channel.

Two, I barely breathe watching the narrow body, a mere slit of motion, dark and steady,

like all mysterious, paddle, paddle, and arrive, now climb, bedraggled and spent

onto the small safety of a floating log. It rests. We catch our breath.

Now it scurries ahead to the other log end. Here my journal stutters with a squirrel story bigger than words.

Unfathomably, it plunges back into blue chants, into uncharted.

We are never done, it says, with a body tiny enough to know.

...