I imagine you buried
in deep pine.
Lowered into breathing earth.

Does regret expand into a lake
becoming a hole in your chest?
I reach in and all I find are evergreen branches.
Breathless lungs, we are embedded in you skin.

Your heart is a fist,
sand  gritty in my teeth and stones
are heavy in our bellies.

I hear your voice over the VCR,
turn away, turn away,

deep,
deep,
deep.

I imagine because
forgiveness needs the morning,
and you were gone with the night.

Gone as the sun came up and
we head whispers of you between
the covers.

turn away, turn away.

I know how to feel nothing small,
and you felt nothing.
We say goodbye in whispers,
and are reminded of you by soft fleshy parts of our hearts
and scratches on VCR tapes,

your voice an endless echo.
This is our past we are still learning.

We use the lighthouse to bring us home
resting on the shore of Lake Michigan
as a welcoming beacon,
from the gallery standing
on the hill I can see our lake.

When we leave we bury our hearts
deep in the stones,
far enough under the surface we reach water.
we breathe in lake air and
draw compasses on the side of the lighthouse.

Water so deep,
and so blue, matching the color
of all of the women’s eyes.
We are caught by the water’s attention,
and when we are pulled back

to our everyday life,
we know the lake rests
within us.

The evergreens protect us from
the sun, glowing warm.
Our skin is tired.

Our mouths are weary
from talking,
saying the same lies over
until they tumble back over themselves.

Our limbs restless, kicking in the water
at the end of dock,
creating an endless wake.
Watching our towels dry in the night breeze,
and hoping they will be dry enough in the morning.

Long ago we were driven into the
lake by a raging forest fire.
Swimming until we thought we’d choke,
we drowned,
our bodies became islands.

Inlets of moss and forest, sand touched
by ***** feet and berry vines eaten bare,
we cry.

The bluffs our witnesses to all
the yelling and crying,
to all the tears that fell like
lightning bugs in the night.

Glowing softly
when we’d look off the balcony of the house.
The lake reeds wrapping around my ankles,
we search for Petoskey stones hidden
in the sand.

The berries stained our
teeth, our fingers,
our bed linens
coated in color.
Were we ever pure,
I cried and my tears were plum.

Our hair laid damp in the foggy
morning orchard air.
The nursery cats greeted us,
and their blue eyes were round enough
to be the blueberries that hung on the fragile vines.

Fragile limbs, bruises left the color
of raspberries and blackberries.
Bruises not visible on suntanned skin,
but the vessels were broken
under the surface.

These kinds of wounds don’t heal quickly, she cooed.
I remember being disappointed in myself for picking the
berries that were still green, that weren’t quite ripe.

Goosebumps scour my skin,
From the shock of the coolness of the lake.
The air damp and heavy,
The moon lights the moss in water too deep
I cannot touch my toes at the bottom,
And I cannot reach my hands back to shore.

I look up to the sky,
Never have I been so wrapped in light and darkness
Simultaneously, that I  
Feel the splotches of light in my eyes
Lock with the stars.

They know a past I am learning,
The beating in our chests has come from them,
The love they have seen, they brought for us.

Earlier, in the car on our way home we were cradled between the lake
And the row of glass houses.
Their windows open and lamps turned on, and I watch the silhouettes of families
At dining room tables littered with plates of leftover dessert
And undone puzzles,
I watch children sitting on floor and laughing,
And I think,
Do they have secrets as thick as ours?
Do they have ghosts with names and voices?

We glide on the smooth concrete,
Flying in the night along the shore as a heron does
In the day
And I can feel the past rising up out of the
Lake,
Beautifully haunting and dark.

I think I will always be
haunted by you.
You'll become a silhouette that will
only exist in the few moments
right before and after sleep.

Your eyes change colors
like a kaleidoscope of twilights.
I hope you remember me even when the
sun shines, when summer solstice arrives.

You were the realest thing I felt in
my bones. You were
the awakener of my limbs.
Goosebumps laid out like a trail
on my skin.

I know what you look like when you sleep,
I know how the ribbons of memory weave in
and out of your eye lids closed, dreaming,
shaking from the weight of the night.

I remember
         What color the starts were
When I first met him.
        
Daylight is now grey
The color of the sky is muted.
His hands, mouth
         The color of cigarette smoke.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I know he’ll look just like you.”

His eyes mudpools,
Just like the ones my mother used to tell me
         My nightmares came up from.
She hangs laundry on the line.

Mudpools.

I imagined the baby growing inside me.
Breaking out of one of the coconut husks from the
Palm trees that grew beneath our terrace.

We were sitting at the plastic, white, stained,
Set of patio furniture that mother spills her wine on, and
My brother stains with paint.

I watch the mudpools widen as he puts out his cigarette on the edge of the plastic,
Searing a perfect
Circle.

I trace my finger on the flower shape,
Cut out in the back of his chair.
Seagulls sing to him in the morning.

I hear hymns in the sea gulls cries,
And I am brought back to when I was a child,
And I watched a woman in church singing praises while she
Held her swollen belly.

Life spilling out of her.
I drowned in mudpools.