It was the day when, at an hour kept for ghosts, I erupted, coating a history of volumes in neon tar. Sound bites, broken text, and tears questioning next steps on the rims of our eyes, hissed and smoked away every protagonist, no resolution. The tall ones when you were the size of my pinky finger, your ponytails stood like a bell tower, you would grow into a duck, and I didn’t hold your hand long enough. Dialogues where the words “yes, and come here, and of course, and I’d love that, and sit next to me” hid in my thorax, where I could have had a monopoly, but I was sidelined.

The chapter when I could be sure there was a gulch in the land, and you had crawled in it, to look up at us as monsters through intermittent torrents, was the turn of the tenderness in my middle to upper mantle, and the perpetual elbow between my temporal lobe and motor cortex. It was the blink that lectured me, like a draft under my blanket, until the sky writhed black to orange to blue.

And so I hurried, steeped in batter, into an operatic maze of southern streets, my legs wheezy and circumspect. When I arrived at the place where I knew you would peer, despite the long drop down, I painted the words to our song in a mural at the end of the runway. I outlined the expression on my face, down to the wrinkles beginning to take shape, and the fear in the posture of my cheeks, and my hand tossing you a hundred kisses, for you to see when you flew away.

Are we hugging from across the Great Plains? Are we nearing the embrace in slow motion, but clutching relentlessly like voracious crocodiles? Are we paying strict attention to the phantom wading just beyond, at the shallow end? Being sure not to miss one piece of the mystery machine, each dawn when geese meet up in the middle of the water for a prayer, or a dignified battle, or show and tell. Are we chucking promises on rolled up strips of wrapping paper out our windows, just hoping they land as a small crane on the others’ chest? Will they smell like us, feel like the warm of walking in the backdoor to find a light left on?

In this way, something is taking our hands, charmed, asking us for the next dance. And it’s rumoring the hints we’ve never given anyone: that we are coast long, watercolor lighthouses in harbors, nooks for faces, cradling neurons. We are the edits to a short film, the forbidden scribbles on the walls of walk-in closets in old houses no longer meant for us. Our feet drape avenues like spooks. We are guileless warriors with rug burned chins and hearts slinging potshots. Marching, usually fleeing, but always suspecting, that not this one, but the next bird nest, will hide a small blue egg. 

I will miss you in a city the color of grass. I wish you everything more than ivy kitchen wallpaper. I love you. 

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.

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. 

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.

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."

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. 

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. 

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.

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 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.