I over-romanticize every city that I've ever only been to once.
the curves of the roads just sweet talk me into thinking the people in
the skyscrapers must be magnificent.
the clicks of my teeth talk to the clicks of my heart, that beg to the
clacks of the ends of my shoelaces stuck in the parking lot cracks
that I've been tripping over for the past eighteen years to let go of
my past and unclench these mourning eyelids that wish to see nothing
but a burning sunrise over the gulf of mexico, but ice has formed
where I used to put my head when you made me tea and told me
everything was going to work out so I have begun to breathe out again.
the lightbulbs in my lungs have only one switch and it's at the top of
the stairs in the house where I grew up, across from the old photos of
my family, some of them are gone and I never got to meet them. I love
them anyway. all those fruit stands on the sides of roads leading away
from our day trips to the edge of someplace real are long gone; gone
back to their farms on wheels made of roots or maybe not but
nevertheless gone from some friendly conversation with a tan stranger
with a wide stranger mouth, still ringing in the air and in the
gravel, stumbling along in summer bare feet, you called out to us and
asked if we'd like to take a dozen brown eggs off your hands, they
were a gift but you simply have too many brown eggs. we fried them on
the sidewalk when we got home with the help of the unforgiving sun and
danced like thieves, forgetting altogether that we ever knew how to
speak english. the peanut butter song glued to the roof of your
beautiful mouth and catching a head cold just before making your way
back to fever, the stubble against my palms when I hold your grinning
face to kiss you, it's like I know why we want to get going but we
don't have the wheels to go. when I still love you in seventy years
we'll remember the exact curve of our legs and how they wrap around
the other, vines or cursive letters connected spelling "thankful" to
answer anyone that was wondering what we feel when we look in each
other's eyes. it's not just day trips and melting ice, I'm lit up, and
my spine wants you to know it.