I want to eat your hair
until it pools thick in my gut,
barreling black through my intestines.
Inhale your elbows, shoulders
every movement, noise,
the face you makes when calculating a tip. Moments laughter
comes so hard your face doesn't make a sound at all

Smoke still lingers in grocery store parking lots,
your puffy eyes hunting caffeine in the noonday sun.
No more a blunder on your part.
Simply a life of difficult days.

Half memories lie within these things.
A little girl who spent summers indoors
, for reasons I don’t recall.
Where her parents were, God only knows.
Venturing out beyond the sunset to drop
bottled notes into puddles and storm drains.

Staring with an amplitude that is making your organs rattle against each other.
I can feel you going on with your day.
It's the salute that hurts, a handshake you don't want to return
graves you planted yourself.

pick the wrong adventure in a conversation,
words move outside of time, today and yesterday
nostalgic for moments still happening,
as if looking back on it from a great distance

The uneventfulness of true struggle is quietly grotesque.
Like the death of a dog I know I should have loved better,
forgetting to witness anything save for the aftermath.

You can’t make fire feel afraid.
We were younger, and we are, and we will be again.