I loved a star that never knew my name,
a silent flame,
fixed in the wreck of night.
Her stillness fooled me
into believing she sang.

She blinked once
in some long-dead century,
and I’ve lived ever since
by ghost light.

They say she's gone,
burned out or broken,
but I keep whispering psalms
to her afterglow,
drinking to the shape she made
in my sky.

I don't need the truth,
just the dream
of her burning.

Like something that waited for me,
not knowing I was too late
the moment I began.

I.
Box fans and mowers drone below,
distant traffic murmurs through summer’s heat.
Memory presses: teeth and old thunder.
Regret. Punishment. Hope. Repeat.

My ears ring with histories,
sometimes cicadas, sometimes sermons,
sometimes her humming, barefoot by the creek,
sometimes the sting of my father’s belt.

Sunlight slants through bloated magnolia leaves,
thick as tongues,
slick with old rain.
It stains the walls with a color like yolk,
like aging joy.

II.
I wake in moonlight,
before the rumble.
Step barefoot onto concrete
still warm from the last sun.

The sky is full of stubborn stars,
hung from the last funeral.
I watch. I wait.
No birds yet. No breeze.
I stay.

I tell myself this is peace.
But the silence knows better.

At lunch I bought a pear,
its shape: a quiet joke.
I cut it clean and slowly,
the blade, the slice, the poke.

It tasted like a breather,
not sweet, just real and right.
Like silence in the stairwell
or breezes late at night.

The afternoon unknotted,
each task a gentler climb.
I fed the cat. I folded shirts.
You’re not here. I’m fine.

Mortgage-bruised pilgrims
linger along Silver Strand,
pop caps against plywood boarding,
edges furred with salt-rust flakes
from storms that chewed the pier.

Seabee retirees
swap tide updates on porch steps;
third-generation surfers
stitch wax into their palms
and still call this south jetty 'church'.

Here my son and I rinsed sand
from our ankles with a garden hose,
him shrieking, laughing, shivering
when cold bit his feet.

I once yelled at him, raging
for dropping keys into surf,
as if that mattered more
than a day of chasing, wrestling in the tide.
He doesn’t remember.
I can’t forget.

Now, he’s taller than me,
vanishing downshore.

I stand outside, voices rise
in the salt-hard wind.
Barbecue smoke drifts
from driveways, tailgates,
settles into dusk-lit lawn chairs.

Boarded bungalows peel to raw board,
splintering porch rails;
nails weep orange along the grain.

A bike frame, chainless,
reddens into memory beside dune grass
still gripping sand.

There is grace in forgetting:
a tide lowers its voice,
sand swallows what was said.

Steel pan in roadside dirt,
just beyond Exit 11: Quartzsite,
sun bouncing off like a flare.

Handle loose, rim dented,
but not ruined;
still whole enough.

It felt like one I swung
at Tomaso’s,
sweating
through the rush,
that night
we plated sixty covers
in under an hour.

Me, this pan,
were used
the way hard things are:
oiled, scrubbed,
flame-kissed and blackened.
Something thick stuck once,
then let go.

I lifted it,
right hand curved
around the handle
as though it never left.
Some things remember you
even when you forget yourself.

I set it in the backseat,
beside the blanket and bag.
thought I’d clean it up,
tighten the handle,
set it on flame,
hang it by a stove again.

I don’t believe in ghosts,
but I believe in steel,
in things that hold the heat
and give it back to you.

He crawled through seven weeks,
her voicemail still unplayed,
burned letters on the stovetop,
and brushed the ash away.

The mattress holds her perfume,
her hair still haunts the sheet.
It lingers just to gut him,
then breaks beneath the heat.

"I gave you what I carried,
a key, a ring, a name.
You marked it as a chapter,
the ending never came."

Streetlights blink and stutter,
pulse yellow, white, then blue.
They gnaw beneath the ribcage
and press on every bruise.

He heard her laughter echo
through gutter sweat and smoke;
coins scatter on the concrete,
a rimshot to the joke.

He cut this trail in whiskey
left dents along the floor,
no battle flag, no anthem,
just shrapnel from the war.

Her glance, a flint and trigger,
still burns behind the eyes.
Not love, not even fury,
just silence split with lies.

The bottle knew its ending;
its glitter salts the ground.
No sirens in the alley,
all bodies have been found.

He slips the lock in shadow
and drifts beneath the gray.
The gospel wilts by morning.
He never meant to stay.

for the one who didn’t

The tomatoes hang eaten.
Some rodent, maybe.
The cayenne doesn't work,
just burns the air I breathe.

Knees swell.
The doctor?
I haven’t called.

This is the small life
we once smirked about.

Summer again.
No mercy.
Too much.
Too bright.

Lately, I forget:
the grigio in the freezer
the last message,
why I opened the drawer.

Lately, I drop things,
envelopes, keys,
my grip softening
with everything.

You said,
“That’s what old looks like.”
But you didn’t get here.

We stay,
we wait,
for mail,
for quiet,
for a name to light the screen.

Oceanside,
in shopfront glass,
I glimpse my portrait
eyes storming, squinted,
shirt caught on wind.
And I ache,
to be so
briefly
here.