Pluto has since made its full rotation. The moon is like the inside of a blood orange, and the stars are so close they seem fake. A dusty blanket of pink fog seems to be pinned over this place and last for miles ahead and behind. Caught in the middle; no parallel road lines; just black earth and rocks that creep up the sides of my boots, wet, despite the dry air—perhaps, (we are heavier, here, now…); bodies float in crystalline ovals, feeding each other fruit, dancing, sleeping, making love. There used to be stocky solar powered homes there and every other driveway cradled a Subaru and bikes laid out like bodies after war on patches of manufactured grass, cut to fit neurotic lawns, and it always smelled like the mist that escaped the first crack of a bucket of crab...Where is that ocean, now? Always, the same song of cicadas versus house crickets; the gentle lull of a garbage can on wheels being pushed down gravel; the soles of shoes massaging concrete sidewalks, back and forth; the man who always left his porch lights on for his dead wife to find. I touch my belly; a tiny foot tries to pierce my thin skin; 2016. All of the planets are where they should be; the rolodex of trains to Philly and Boston and Greenwich and D.C. flips furiously. There are no flying cars, Frank.

You are brown and eating frozen grapes in the grass: petting the hair of some tattered doll, singing a song I taught you. I try to conjure a face, but all I know is the back of your small head—an afro littered with dandelion residue. You are lucky to be nothing more than a thought...because I don’t know if I could have ever been as good to you as you will never be to me. The exchange between parents and children seems to go this way: you - a wonder; I - everything I hope you never become. A spongy piece of angel food cake, as elusive as love, I would wish you didn’t put your tiny pink tongue, lapping, at our French doors—the dry swipe of play goop on our marble countertops. Maybe we ate avocados and blood oranges together, drank rice milk together; maybe I told you all about your star sign, gave you a nickname like: Mia Amata.
Our talks are never without melody—a miracle, like a thick, forbidden plum in a desolate dream forest; silk in the hallow of a black tree.

I shouldn’t be so sad.
All of the money I’ve earned so far has been my own...
All that is mine remains just, so—every decision made out of lust, habit, or both.