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. 

The Lake Is Draining and We Have to Throw These In It

It was July and we were going to be astronauts. Wobbly heads on sticking bodies, exhaling clues of jasmine and cotton candy. Putty in the scratchy lawn, in his sightline. Skyward, the back porch was a burning cathedral, an altar to my flower pots. The color in our eyes triggered a sequence of flight delays, while miniature roller coasters descended in the grass all around us. I trembled at the small, distant screams of anticipatory fear.

We believed it might be daylight forever. Felt apprehensive about what the weighted air could make us say. That all of our courage leaned on the orbital motion of the earth. 

I culled all of the pins from my hair, and with a river rock, smoothed them straight to shape a hook for an arm. I whined about the discomfort of my overheated eye patch. How it branded my alabaster face. He said it was bewitching, my pirate glow. I’d filled my pockets with stones, to practice my pitch, and I fumbled with them while I hummed a wish that we would happen to notice a hot air balloon, in the corner of our eyes, streaming a message to us. Like: I SEE YOU DOWN THERE, or, YOU LOOK PEACEFUL RIGHT NOW, or, IF YOU KNEW ME, WOULD YOU LIKE ME?

After I shifted the gossamer dress cloaking my limbs, I drew, with the finger that I'd broken the least, on his back:

Bend your head slightly to the left, your ear up to that cloud, shaped like an ushanka. And then see how long you can hold your breath. I will time you and record it because I can’t have you slowing me down if we ever climb a great mountain.

You can dig at me for a while, but not for words. Rather, beam something to me, like the chorus in a seashell. Through a cable line or a copper pipe.

Ask for it without asking for it. It can hurt, but not like a scar.

Don’t expect the defeat. Or try to dissect me like what idles at the bottom of beakers.

Prevent abbreviating everything you pronounce.

Then I will want to give you a universe. I will ever so lightly, scamper to the kitchen, to make you oatmeal, and put the bowl in your hand while you’re not paying attention. When you’re reading the middle paragraph of a short story about a man or a woman who did something heroic or tragic with or to another person. And then when you look up, I will tell you, in order, the puzzles I keep closest, the ones I’ve half solved. I will let you saturate my landscapes and overwhelm my oxygen supply.

Just like the seasons. 

Returning Jars for Deposit

This pair, regularly soiled and ashen, just this once, looked like a picture of Ireland. Being sampled and robbed. Packing a trunk to float, and break their legs.

Passing them, with a gaze like I could harvest only a switch of my wrist. Leaping through the debris of trees, timbering a layer. I took off two gloves and reserved them around my waist. Welding hot palms to the edges of a frozen lake. Taste buds rooming coal. I offered twenty dollars for an island of peanut brittle, and noted it melting to the creeks of their sugar-soaked lips. We were at a carnival, dipping our choices, and fingerprints into plastic sandwich bags. Clock ticks practicing handstands against every puffy wall.

June beetles crackling in the sky. The middle flavor of a raspberry macaroon. The jitterbug like lighting in my dining room. I felt it all wrong. And couldn't say what I didn’t want. That their paws were something overboard. A shedding Maple. My back teeth. Not regretting, and voluble, and exhausted. They laughed so uncrushed. On the tip of planting roses in my mouth. 

I wished: That the sky we could swap, with bows and arrows and palaces, was not sleeping so far away. That our bodies weren’t tripping. Confused by the geological affection of a red planet. Placed in a package being edged from, not toward, granted.

Tectonic Plates Go Bump In the Night

Before the time before. In the early morning blue that paints nobody can hear whatever you breathe right now. She posted a letter to a man who was not born in a suburb of an elastic city. A man who kept time on a pocketwatch. For him, she cooked run-on sentences that grew more exaggerated as they went, and then humbled at the fall. For an almost plan of relief. Of how they could jump in, and later have a story about how they jumped in, or the salt burning up their noses, or how far away they were drifting from the shore, and how maybe they should go back.

She included a disclaimer about how she would not give literal, like a hotdish. That she was not a hypochondriac, and in her silverware drawer, lived nothing but tiny spoons. How she was not here to cure, or shine a flashlight onto something hidden under a car, or give instructions on how to mouth the words back. That she was meant to eat the cherry out of whatever girly martini he might order. To reach across the table, maybe over his plate, for a history book, or a chess piece.

And what then if she needed him on the frontline. Or in the rib of her sweater. What then if at a quarter to eleven, she woke him up to say that earlier, she eyed an airplane needling the sun, lilting in the set, and how it could have been an orange.

It's like checkers, how you reorder us

It’s because we need to feel comforted, the lights. We sprinkle them like seeds to passify. Days stealing degrees. Hiding them in the lining of wool coats. The way we are vulnerable and brittle, nudging broken in a still life of dueling tones. How to recover from tiles chipping off our stairs, empty canvases just above. Caustic language competing for a scowl. 

It’s how we want to feel kept. Not bested.

Like the way I can’t put on lipstick.

The way you can’t feel the hair on your neck.

It’s how you wear a full body cast. Coloring in all the zebra stripes. All the encyclopedias. Not stopping for a bite, or the bathroom. Stopping for a cigarette. How we have a light in our chests, glowing for the only page you’ve ever marked.

And we zipped you up at the corners. Poured out all the aluminum cans where you can feel it on the cheap.

And I shut the door behind me, counting sighs, stashing zeros and ones. Wishing for a sign. Asking for one, two, three, maybe to leave early. To stay for an hour until it passed.

It’s not even about the way the water pulls you under any more. The rate at which your legs get cramped to paddle. It’s just how you can’t sit alone in a room. Or hold your coffee cup. When you have to look in, and around the circle and sing what you’ve done. What bears down. 

It collapses you, and you will want for your palms to be outlined, and your chin to be pinched, and your hair to be tangled in two hands, and your eyes to meet eyes and stay, and to be squeezed because somebody might have stopped breathing without you, and to know that you deserve it, and to be all right with it, until you die.