I heard a man say "hate teeth"

I pictured, if I could calm the paper cranes tangled in my spine. Lift the edge to watch, a skyline oxidize each rib. Vertebrae C7 through T12. If I could, I would remember the words. I could recall your squint. Gravity holding our toes. You stenciling the moon. 

How I said it, dipped out and away from my teeth like a neckline. The flood sipping in one more lark with a code.

After it rang a dozen times, I answered the phone in a party dress, the color of wedding cake. And asked, at what does a ghost hint? If it mutters, now do you know where I’m going with this? 

For No Other Reason Than to Be Here

I wrote: Dear Nathan carved in the sidewalk, where are you in eight years? Have you landed where we guessed, under not just any wave? You figure, all these calendar months in a dollhouse, wears on a name. A sure bet like a ruler, I will smile a boundary here, and one upstate, and your tools for dirt hanging on my doorstep.

Chasing you, it’s not like chasing a shipwreck. Everything like a scoop of crumbling yellow vests. A constellation of vanilla bean flecks on my shoulder blades. Nothing like poker chips. Everything like half pints. Crop circles that we’ll spin into yarn. Dirt in my mouth.

I’m Passing this baton to you, for the next relay. The one you have to win. To tug lightly on my ponytail, on the tail of my kite. Hushed like my cadence in the dirt. Raining a light show. For no other reason than to be here, in the company of strangers on the back of my swing.

always getting a clue

i introduced you first to my arms. then i let them slump, to breathe in, for a half an hour. we were making progress with each fit. a catalog of buzzwords. finding rocks of gold concealed in sharp grass. winnowing our tubas as if we had amplifiers in our throats. speaker boxes for smaller print. for the lesser known.

and our eyelashes were a monolith. a school of iron butterflies. our parietal lobes slipping on mascara. a freight truck in the flying v, where our right defaulted to the left. a la gauche, with a wink.

we stopped sending letters in ink blots. etching wood with agates. never spoke of the audacity of rodeos. and we started wearing seersucker and walking on capitals, never dotting the j.

this side of the river was a weapon for reason, and a knockoff. and we copied it down, on the rear of an auto-insurance bill. in the lining of each and every precipice. a watering hole for foxes, if we could.

like it will multiply

she said, "i will look at you like this is scraping out of my chest."

"i will look at you like i am capacious. like i can see everything, but i can't. i can taste it like mercury. and feel it on the back of my knees."

"i will put my thumbprint here, on the chalky spot below your lip, like a measure."

"i will give you what is muddled and invisible. what stabs and pinches. what is guarded. wrecked. like smoke and chipped bricks. like years. what is pulpous and hushed. blanched. what brings you to your knees."

she said, "i will take you where there are no strings or streets that you recognize. interior digressions. bursting on your tongue. your ship. you will feel it like a vibration."

because there's nothing like a whisper split. wasps parting. puffing.

taunting fish with wands to see who's hungry.

it couldn't have been the sea

they said it was the city of snakes. the city of love. of sand castles and ships. what we would become. all i smelled was juniper berries. and salt. and i tripped over brown eyes asking me one more time. and the sea level dropped and when it came back, i sketched you in it. in my boots. in my collar. at the bottom of the hill. to peel the skin from my nose when it wasn't easy. to uncurl my palm with the ginkgo leaf and put it in an encyclopedia, to brown. in the last pages that we can't read. the last great invention. the last flight. the last bite.

you and me in a cardboard box that won't melt even when the water sogs through.