You know this boy for a minute. And still you kiss like long lost friends.
He doesn’t sing. He is beneath the landslide, maybe in a champagne sky.
You miss him. In that moment he is there and he is not.
And softly he pulls you in, but is he not ungraspable memory? A woman-made construct like time. Like love.

How I long for your wide open sky.
I long for your sunbeams and your rain—whatever falls into my mouth,
I will gladly take in.

August. How I cling to all your pasts
and all your uncertain futures.
I cling to your promise of ever ever green
and I wait at your doorstep, naive nymph from nether.

Was it for nothing, August?
Do I keep you on my tongue and never in my heart?
August. August.

Endless pastures and lightning-laden nights. Your fleeting love speaks through the dark.

Still—
The witching hour,
a pond at dawn.
Still—
Nevertheless,
after all this time,
I look for you in a sea of people.

Your stairs shrieked like an infant at midnight
and your walls haunted my dreams.
Still you housed my hands that touched so tenderly your floors, your mold, your crown.
Your windows stared: eyes on a hill. And I wonder what it feels like to be seen
like a monument in a ghost town.
You housed my head
so constantly swirled, maimed, losing consciousness.
You housed me so fiercely, intensely,
with a love that sang my restless soul to sleep.
Everyday you kept me in your arms, your womb.
You framed all my sunsets, my stars,
my endless sighs.
It is time to let your walls collapse,
your doors forever close,
but I have left my heart underneath your old, old bones.

The street is illuminated in that shade of orange
that makes everything liminal
and we move in an opposite direction as the runners.
It seemed funny back then—
like fish veering away from its school
and maybe that’s what we are.

As we sink our feet in the slightly muddy field
and we sit without care of our light-colored jeans,
the fireflies light the dimmest corners.
We ooh and ahh like children
and maybe that’s what we are.

Boy and girl with no faces, no names.
I know you by a monosyllable
still I come, still,
like strangers made bolder by the circumstance
and maybe that’s all we are.

beneath the tin roof,
beside the shrubs of unnameable greens,
where white light bouncing off white walls
does not touch your skin but sear you all the same⁠—
the snip of metal,
the lull of sporadic humming,
sends you to opiated oblivion,
and on your feet:
waves of dark hair
touch the earth
and get blown away
lightly, slowly