Water for ink
stains my toes
biro blue
my ending written
casting words before me
gently bobbing
floating flowers
on the sea of self destruction
curled petals
which read
not yet

I’ve tried to leave her before
but watching from the plane I cry.
the patchwork valley below
digs into my heart.  
nestled between blue mountains
cradle me here, I am safe.

The purple desire.
A vortex of lust.
If the clam were to shut
on the fingers of a plate,
then what is the pearl? A rooster?
A blue embrace.

The plates are traps.

if i were any good at songwriting,
perhaps i’d be like clairo,
and write about how soft you’ve made me feel,
or the gaping hole you left in my stomach that spells out
s-u-m-m-e-r

if i was any good at romance,
i’d have straight up told you
how cool you were
how cool your creations were
how cool it’d be if we hung out

even as my heart is ablaze,
like sunny hong kong,
the wind singing along,
you are wrong, so wrong,
for this

perhaps i could write a novel, then
of a forbidden love between two lovers
in a summer long, long
ago
except it’d be fiction,
but maybe i’d lie and preface it with:
“based on a true story”,
if it means making a blockbuster,
lover

so come on virginia,
i think we could do it if we tried…?

when did i first fall in love with you?

was it under the never ending skies in chicago?
in those cruel winter nights
where only you kept me warm.
or was it amidst the song of crickets and breeze?
in the summers of virginia
where even you would sing along.

That summer in West Virginia:
washing myself clean
with brown water
from the Ohio river.
I saw gar sunning themselves
near the surface: fish with a thousand teeth,
fisherman’s nuisance. Like me:
take the bait and sink.

Matt takes us to the woods
and promises a surprise.
We slash brush for miles,
and I bleed. Thorns cut up and down
my skin. So easy to get lost out here –
multiflora rose so thick you can’t see
the sky. Crawl back to where you came from.
Plants move so slow, but I have patience.

Back when I could tell the birds apart
I held a dead wood thrush
in my hand
and it felt like air.
Eyes closed and tilted to the side –
because of the window, because a bird’s eyes
are not adapted to see glass. I wanted to bury it,
but instead I laid it in the grass.
For the worms: because we are all going.

We find the magnolias. No one is quite sure
how they ended up here, but they look exotic,
different from the pawpaws and oaks
with their shiny leaves and white flowers.
To be a bird in the magnolias – hermit thrush,
singing in a language too old to understand.
Voice of god calling out to say: come home.
If only I knew how to listen.

1.
Rolling down to Virginia
in a gray shuttle – the rain
cascades off the windows.
I close my eyes but I can’t sleep.
I don’t know anyone here
well enough to be that kind
of comfortable. We reach the bay bridge
but the fog is so thick it’s like we’re suspended,
or we never left the ground to begin with –
no water beneath this bridge.
It isn’t raining in Wachapreague,
for now, the wind is cold
and it blows the clouds away.
If I shield my eyes to the sun
I can see way out past the tidal creeks
and the salt grass – out to the Atlantic.
Later, rain comes in waves –
we cook dinner and joke about ghosts,
and I wonder how many of my own
I brought here with me.

2.
What a privilege to own a boat –
to be your own captain, or even
just to know the waves. The sun is brilliant
but the wind burns cold – before the end
of the day, my nose and cheeks
are lobster-red. It’s so easy to get lost
in the tidal creeks – just acres and acres
of spartina, flat and brown now
but six feet tall in the summertime.
We dredge up creatures from the bottom –
***** and worms and sea slugs.
We eat lunch on a graveyard of shells –
I find the empty husks of horseshoe *****.
Eagles and oyster catchers watch us pass
sit tight on similar whitewashed mounds
of expired homes. The sun is low
when we reach the mudflats –
here the earth is shallow. Seven ways
to catch a clam, but I only know one –
to look for holes that bubble. I fill
my pockets with the dark misshapen
creatures. Sometimes the holes
rush full of water before I can even see
what I dug up. Soon the tide will come back
and swallow the wet sand again.
I want to stay put, watch the muddy water come
learn to filter through it
like the oysters and the clams.

3.
Early morning on the bayside –
wind, more brutal than yesterday
beats the surface until the waves
are whitecaps, and the skiff pitches.
We go back to the tidal creeks,
where the trees block the wind
and the sun illuminates the muddy water.
We watch an osprey glide and dive for fish.
Back in the lab, isolated in white
I see strange animals. For hours
we look for answers to the simplest
of questions: what is this?
Some creatures we toss back
and some we wrap in clear plastic bags.

4.
The long ride home –
half between sleeping and waking
drenched in sunlight. I’m small,
or trying to be – conserving space
wherever I can. I eat my fill of ginger snaps.
The bay bridge is crystal clear this morning
and it gives me a strange feeling, deep
in my stomach – somewhere between
excitement and dread, a fear
or a nod toward what’s coming –
a mystery, creeping in and unfurling
like when I was a kid, awake too late at night
feeling dumb, for hoping, for wanting,
and most of all, for not yet knowing.

We've grown distant
two lonely lighthouses
in the middle of the ocean
our glow shining away
from each other

Sailors come for safety
little did they know

We are searching for
the light too.