She came home smelling like him, his scent lingering pleasantly all day
Lost her Jack to a cop
Forgot who Arvan was (possibly someone’s drug dealer)
Resolve bubbled and floated away into the air along with sobriety
She was tracing his contours at the end of the night
While ravaging liquids romanced in the bones
Her heartbroken friend gave her a letter to deliver, on patterned paper, sealed in lipstick
You are the catalyst
To the deconstruction
Of my purposeful design
She cried
And that night it seemed
They were surely going to succumb to a trite wasting
At the age of 20
Tag Archives: Youth
Driving
We were interchangeable from time to time,
Occasionally marbling and entangling until
The swirls of color were infinite and inextricable
Under the bridge
You browsed the newspaper
With a cigarette hanging from your red lips and I laughed
On the veranda we floated under the sun
Golden from dawn and youth
You stood next to me as he slithered by, his eyes boring through me
On the cafe patio
You touched my hand
When his unexpected footsteps wrenched my heart, chilled my nerves
In a quiet hallway
Alone with worry
I cried a little when you set it ablaze
Though the very next week
We lay melting on concrete in foggy night air
Moongazing translucent white halos
But eventually
While we bled ink into small books
I leaked colors with an unparalleled hardness and
You bitterly wandered and lost your fury
Until my tongue was stone and your visions gray
We found ourselves consumed with counting creeping wrinkles and tedious failures
Remembering this
A drop of rain humming, swimming across the windshield
Became a quivering lake in my eyes
But I did not know how to turn around
Rural Town
She’s at the cafe again, sipping coffee, watching her friend sweep the floor while the sun streams through the windows but when she is not looking the trees whisper ill-fated tales of childhood to each other and the familiar wind and snow rage on an empty field steeped in her blood. Every corner of this place is loneliness and desertion, the scent of which clings like a hungry leech waiting patiently for the spirit to suffocate. You can flee to California but this town crawls in your veins, bursts in your bones.
Morning Coffee
They held daffodils between their teeth as they wove flower crowns and years later
Flipping through old books she found four-leaf clovers pressed between pages
Crushed flat and still, preserved for no one
She felt the heat and shine of the rising sun and saw her friend in his car, preparing to leave the summer behind
She called out to him from the patio and said I love you
He turned to her and responded Ugh stop drinking
The child molester sitting a table away asks her about a boy as the morning coffee begins to waft
She says Give me a cigarette and I’ll tell you
She takes a drag and weaves a tale of indifference
As he lectures her about fickleness
Emerald Evening
The boat is aglow with firefly lights and with every slow deliberate breath
They are floating past the dock where just a change of mind ago they sat by the fire, kissing cigars
While she threw dull smiles at the red flames, unwound unrequited attachments,
And left someone else behind in the rainforest daydreams
The barge of drifting lights and youth is swimming in circles
Creating a breeze that makes her dress dance like a sea creature with pink tentacles
Behind the crystal of her champagne glass, his eyes are green in the dimness of this yacht and in the morning
She’ll notice they are an unfamiliar slate color
She looks back to see the fire is dead at the dock and wonders if she has been here before
Mystery
When they were 19 they sprawled on the cafe patio
Shook their unbrushed, raven hair and laughed
They took free cigarettes from old men
Not knowing which one would turn out to be a child molester