The moon wanes as if it’s taken to counting down the days

A post solstice clock sliding across my window each night

Im watching couples in the terminal sway into one another

(The fireworks roll distant)

Your quiet count down is triangulated about the earth in delay

(The earth continues to orbit its star)

Thoughts unbidden

Of your post shower shyness,

Of how soft your body sleeps,

Of conveying all the longing with an embrace,

You exhale

We slip quietly into a new year

my mothers father

the one who adopted all of his children

perhaps too humbled by Him

to have the audacity to create

(although ive never really asked)

eats fruit in his car alone by the sea and

listens to christian radio for hours

inspiration for his sermons

and he tells me that love isnt love

if it doesnt bring life

because by its nature

its bringing death

(and ive never really been brave enough to ask

what he thinks of seedless grapes)

Ears pricking, only quietly haunting any other type and skirting the edges of things wolfishly, I’m howling all of the things that build up at a forever indifferent moon, pupils  narrow in the light from a cracked phone screen, insatiable, academics are another breed altogether, we go back to our hometowns and feel too big inside, consumed

I deleted your
Number but now I know it
By heart anyways

Did you ever find
out who smashed the window of
your truck in that night?

I have not lived here long enough yet to make the miles between town seem any less than what they are but there's a chance they never do

I wonder this when I watch the cynical navy men and women slink from their houses between the trees when it's still dark, asking if I was a newbie, wondering if they were the reasons for the prolific "don't drink and drive in memory of:" signs posted along the the lithe road that twists between lakes and the far flung gas stations that cater to them

where the mountains peeking through in the west seem out of place, unsettling, like a secret relayed to the casual ear

I have not lived here long enough yet to have had that fortnight meeting on the lawn with thoughts of my return to the earth and a pair of nail clippers or to be able to dance with the creaks in the hardwood

And I'm still missing the droll herons that would loop from the north around the pines of my home on the hillside and land in a huff in the low tides amongst the gulls, I miss knowing, the path of the sun across seasons on my chambers floor and whether the chickadees here prefer the birches in the park or the tall broad leaves that stare at me from across the lake and the when of all things that move in the dull quiet

////

But Ive lived here long enough that the bruise on his neck hasnt faded and I wonder if we'll be over before that happens too

Sometimes I think they are bugs
when I see them from the corner of tired eyes
I catch them wandering between my fingers and knees and scratch at phantom itches
and fidget when I stand in line
Pulling at the make up below my eyelids
a target on the hollow of my throat if you were looking for one
I pieced together the patterns of strangers like constellations
And never let my friends use pen

name tag, smile, tattoos
stare at complimented shoes
too shy to ask you