This pumping heart won't wait for mermaids, to wash up to shore

For what will it wait?

She calls: grasslands, and shark fins, and scripts. A cartel of words that pin me down in a sodden field and take everything. For, with one sigh or twitch, the spike on the rear of my nape. The location where few lips have won. The wills to live, the penchant for admirable consumption. For all the fires that burn up my silent film where nobody listens, but everybody wants and takes, and takes. When thinking of surrendering fears, and bugs, and beasts, also feels such like getting into something that's leaving, like the relief of extra scraps of fabric keeping up with a moth-rotted dress.

She cries: All the masts are clinking and I haven’t had enough of the seven thousand butterflies, angry up my wind pipes. I’m eerie, avoiding a purple band-aid hugging the path where I walk with such furious purpose, I nearly levitate; where a tidal wave is waiting to drown what I can derive, but won’t, and, I’m not moving fast enough. I’m tasting the shape of the textbook evening, cureless. A gnat snagged in my eyelashes hums something about this time exiting left, the love, all of the earthquakes, and how to wear it. It says in layers, fastened to the second last, with just enough of a slit to sneak urges to hands attached to nobody particular. I merge with anything that respirates, swamp, or swamp thing, and even the unsound pieces of hair that swim in my decolletage.

She admits: I manipulate each bone in my back to heighten to a crescendo meant for girls with more length, and lure. I crisscross my legs with each stride, and fingers, for less added material, crowded by skin expecting what I might never be expecting. Summer is over, and it was hard.

Slingshots will have their way

Remove it, the middle of me. And bring it over there swiftly, on a metal table with knives spread to shape. Carve it into something we can be proud of, a featherless holiday bird. Rest it next to my breach. On fire, spitting at my profile like the holiest war.

I only ever wanted the top and the toes, to arc my silhouette around the skyline we reared piecemeal, to keep the promise of the most attractive western city behind each knee. I only wished two of three: the strength to stand without opening my mouth for even a taste; to peer away and net bumbled whispers right at the corner where everyone dispatches their favorite flavor.

In here, I am riding in the back of a pickup truck, wearing the Good Witch's slippers. So rouge for me to hop. Letting the funnel cloud winds ruin me. Here, under an umbrella, refined like scalloped potatoes. Buzzing for honey until I discover the notes are all out of key, past my fingertips. The most distant bull in the match. Spading my heels up the hill, then descending like a cavemouth, into the widest field of crop circles. Green teeming with Granada tea roses and fragrant dollops imitating crumpled hands, my greatest defense. 

Maybe I need it, the bitten lip.

It’s impossible, and frightful, to rest in a place where babies appear at every traffic light. Like the intersection where there is a bench advertising an infant, not a realtor, growing a bubble from its skull that says: “You complete me.”

She leans on the public bay, near to the condescending infant, filling her gaps, pumping up lips with honeycomb and olive juice. Feeling two ovaries and a stomach full of wine collide with each stretch. 

“We have definitions for people like you,” it signed, with tiny, chubby fingers, eyeing her dress barely draping kneecaps, too aware of themselves. 

“You’re a withholder, and more,” it mouthed. “The sooner you can sleep with that, the better you’ll know what you can’t mean.” 

She stares inside her chest, suddenly broken open, and feels the magic marker on newsprint, soaking everything into a pulpy story of how it’s spelled and where can the sentence go without killing the feeling of breeze tossing each strand.

So she falls back an hour, to straws in lighted summer drinks and stained teeth in the pond. To where the pink elephants on her coaster are scraping her tongue, and feeding her sparkling water, washing away bloody gums. In her corner, taping split lips, and a fractured bridge.

Telling her: When would it ever be just pretty, to fight something so hard? 

She falls back to where maybe instead, he pulled over and stepped into the road, to gather each marble from her backpack. Collecting the paper trail of her escape, in his bundled up Marmot soft shell. A cable television program of how their house burned down to nothing that felt like home. To the place where he realizes how this isn’t a carnival in a parking lot, and she isn’t his puppet. That he would draw topographic maps of her circulatory system, number and chart every joint, if she needed. 

To where he would tell her he could merely brush her face and every letter would make a word, would make a song, would make a banner to promote, not surrender. Where he would tilt his head back when he admitted he wasn’t ready to cross her off the list. To the look on her face when she couldn’t think of the shape of that one sculpture in a museum of housewives three winters ago. To where every day, he had a summary of how her cheeks were getting fleshier, and he preferred it.

Because everyone deserves a roof over their head

"If I were heavier, I could keep you," she said. "Like 'Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss,' you wouldn't drop these arms revolving your face."

Under the 28th floorboard, we're feeling the walls for each other. And all of our ghosts are fixed with sheets on a clothesline, draping near to our raspberry lawns, in this blue and red, and yellow, Lego city.

They're shouting to us about our sprained wings. Screaming, where will you crash, and will your scraps settle as beautifully, without me?

We're blotting our dewy cheeks with every manuscript of original head bumps and fast-forwarding. Looking for the sweet we've already had but didn't know we had. On similar lips of grape-soda bottles. Seeking the right vein, on the right arm, with the same coordinates as a decade ago. Writing in the same language on the same college-ruled notebooks filled with the same notes of key points of five years ago. Theories granulated, rendered, and spread on my jaw line until I'm smothered. Thickening and almost conquering and adding up to the kingdom of she without him and him without her, and in reverse. 

"I will not be left a stencil, watching this turn into the most misshapen noun," she said. "I am fresh goose bumps, fitting into your pegged blocks, your cavities, trying not to duck, ready for building, and commingling colors until there's the bluest shade of safe."

I Never Knew I Was an Actress

That was us, you know. Two black birds, stamping the leftovers of the coldest season, circling the best part of our story like seed. Giving away the most furrowed brows. Meeting halfway in being frightened, half to death. 

When I saw a wooden shark on the shore, I recorded my bare toes and how they plowed the sidewalks. Matchstick men and pot pies. Tottery at more than one word, I waited for you. You, ordering and then dismantling your suitcase. Screening a thousand loaded phone calls about sewing it back together with her machine, throwing pencils for darts at the holes in your atmosphere. In my raincoat, at the laundromat. Knees buckling like a temperate spell of aphids. 

It thieved me in a dream, what you gave, took on your way out. On my spine, completely. Ribs so stretched, they were islands. Clearing airplanes for landing on my cheekbones. On the river, where you rafted me across on your back, and glued velcro to me, to stick to our paperweight luggage. 

It was like a method, white flipping pancakes in the cotton sky. Had I been waiting for it to be screamed in light bright, in the sand? I dove it to the bottom, to the fourth, where we removed all of July and bodies of water, and hiccups, and you choking on me, and my forehead, and the signal to go, and the melodies through candy instruments, and fairy tales of the great white us.

An inflated hand, a prompt like a flash in that sodden lighthouse, like me, at the sea wall.