A Gloss Written By Zo Flicker

Paper Trails.

Rae Helms and Peixuan Ouyang.

Grizzly Grizzly.

May 2026.

A Gloss 

by 

Zo Flicker

(First Visit)

I.

I set my things down.

Music filters through the floor, ceiling, or walls. I wander into the hallway, listening for the sound             source. Backtrack, find it clearest in this room.

This place is lived in (Helms)—I murmur to myself, 

this place is living,

this place has been shared.  

II.

This room isn’t windowless. It is almost.

/ A fever / my lover 

sweats out/beneath 

sand  /  in the living 

room / and broken 

foundations         /

In the corner, leaned flush as a caress: a joist or a support or a strut or a beam.

Paper’s relative undergoing torsion, loadbearing writing on its surface.

An intimacy to not knowing the story. 

A guttural knowing of the story.     

When a new song comes on, I dance.

III.

The projector fills out through motes and photons, a piece of wire mesh glass.

A metonym—some office door, or the entry to my apartment building.

The loop backscatters, hits the wall and spreads around the entrance/exit.

I step in front, interrupt, become a haptic screen.

This is a reflection of you (Helms).

IV.

I retrace my steps. Clockwise, counterclockwise, clockwise.

Graphite and vellum. Staples. Pins. 

This border-control fingerprint scanner (Ouyang) plays a looped film of itself being cleaned, prepared for prints. This card pinned to the wall, proportional with the screen, a green perimeter, something demarcated. The building around the scanner. 

The oils transposed versus those wiped away. The print and the scan. What is carried with and what clings.

        This is the impact / this is an outcome / this is a trace / this is a repercussion / this  is residual (Helms).

Background presumes foreground, if needed creates one—recursive landscape, a small particle reagent technique, a green box on a white wall. 

V.

I touch nothing.

I shine a light through the glass sheet, the handwriting / onto the schematic, the beam, the card. I move the light and the shadows warp-shift-play.

Up close —

cursive in aqua, rust at the edges of the glass where it’s been broken and/or cut.

Reasonable wear and tear, the elements—two implicated senses of concrete. 

There is a building collapse. 

Living rooms are laid open to air and image. 

Debris and form become one another. 

(Second Visit)

I.

I set my things down in the same different place.

A bird’s call through an open window. Weed smoke coming from somewhere.

Paper trails without paper—world lines, the “form of an impact” (Ouyang).

Trail: evidence/sign/lag/follow/path

The impact a form takes on: the spreading wake behind identity, digits and footprint, the face ID, the voice, recognition. 

What is framed, behind glass, in fragments, up against.

Whorls: a furrow, a friction ridge.

II.

Annotations to an image—where they said to excavate, to grid over the land, to measure and mark, how to tear down one in a row, how long to neglect before all by itself.

The redundancy.

A timestamp.

The projector loops a landscape. The camera spins around. From the outside, the light lands and lingers in a “place that is constantly shifting” (Grizzly Grizzly), “hovering at the edge of disappearance” (Ouyang). 

  Another building was carried into this one whole, not fragmented.

A screen is a window. 

A window is a door.

A door is a screen.

III.

Coarse aggregate

blur —

press —

erode —

     In here—the furrows are louder.

                   you—an interpellation.

I can’t find the beginning and end 

(one of these is a gerund).

Two senses of ethereal—   

a rubbing, a negative relief.

IV.

Stories stacked atop each other.

The structure must remain 

over an imaginary point

to avoid torque and failure       .

V.

After visiting, I walk to work and am met by the same asides—brick and wood and glass, lots neither vacant nor empty because they are not lots. Tomorrow and the day after that and the day after the day after that until they’ve gone.

       Minutiae I cannot pick up or set down, or touch or not touch.

       These works follow me in common.

        The things I brought were already here.

Writer’s Bio:

Zo Flicker is a poet, sound artist, and photographer from the San Francisco Bay Area, now based in Philly. Her writing has appeared in Voicemail Poems, Frozen Sea, Peel Lit, and Discount Guillotine, and has been collected in two homemade and handmade chapbooks, Anaerobics (2018) and [SIC].rar (2022). Her preferred styles to work in are serial poems, queer forms, noise, drone, sampling, and collage.