Something, digested to

Again last night I dreamed the dream called Laundromat.
Again I am the one tumbling. I’m gnawed to the cadence

of the dryer’s drum; a metronome for your unblinking
pupils to watch me from the porthole, corneas

tunneling into mine with each revolution like a stripped screw
stuck in place. The coils of the heating element loosen

my flesh to garlic skins. I’m peeled clove by clove, finger
by ear until the dryer’s circuitry resembles veins, until its belts

and motors resemble organs, until my ulcers stop
hurting, until neither of us are tethered to

my prognosis, until my de-creation is no longer
our obligation, until my bones are tempered

aluminum, until they, too, are consumed; until the dryer contains
more human than I do. You blink

a message to me in binary that, eclipsed and moon-marbly, the florescent
lights behind your silhouette render indiscernible to what remains

of my vision. You put another three quarters—no, fingernails—into the machine’s
coin chute to try communicating again, but it doesn’t really matter

to either of us anymore, this cycle of being
seen eaten by something, into something; to see
someone go

from, something, digested to, no one, nothing.

Joshua Kayo is a visual and conceptual poet from Hayward, California and Montgomery, Texas. He received both a B.A. in English (Creative Writing Concentration) and an MFA in Poetry from Texas State University. His work appears in The Very Edge: Poems (Flying Ketchup Press, 2020), Sybil Journal, Los Angeles Review of Los Angeles, and various other places online.