“let's loll on a sunny rock, lick our wounds,” you said. you were tilted toward me, you were reaching away like cypress. i am pretending to listen but the pelicans—"You And I,” you said, escaped with my family, i played with bits of string as a kid. birds joining forces, scooping up schools of fish, spitting them in the air, makes me want to shake my elbows out like a chicken. a barnyard bird, i crooked my arms and sprout barn-owl wings out: owls fly silently, prey to nothing. “pray to Him, He’s testing you,” you said. “prey to nothing,” i say, without looking up. or i looked up, but not at you. i look all the way up. i am looking for the california condor with his Bald Head and his Endangered Species and his Mates For Life. his weirdness among other birds, his impossibility. they are tracking him.
i write my name and cross it out, the leaves turn orange for no reason in july / in cahoots or sympathy with southern wildfires / iris patches that re-name me. i cross myself out with the straggly branches. the starlight mints. buttercream cala lilies lopped over, top-heavy, tired of living so close to the ocean. you are not the ocean like saltwater taffy, like red or yellow plastic buckets full of sand. you are the ocean like salty flowers, like all sorrowful things that crust up in disappointment, your careful draw-bridge drawn, all stone lion statues who lose their pledge-paw to the weather. their noses corroded in the jetstream of history. sharp things. i am pliable, i have edges that bend. you are the favorite wrinkled poem that gives me papercuts. i keep you under my pillow. you Invader of Dreams: you are unexpected.
”stop startling me like that,” you say, “I forgot, I...got distracted...” i pour the teabag on the floor because you’re too close and i can feel your breath breathing me, the chamomile, the jasmine, the peppermint. the jasmine is a seed-pod that sprouts up a starry white-pink forest when it hits the linoleum. green flecks pepper my sneakers. a moment, yes. i forget you. i stand there quietly, thinking to breathe, biting my lip, then parting the leaves again, remembering. it smells like dusty storybook elf-love or trees that come alive when i cluck my tongue. “smells like someone’s grandma’s house,” you say, muffled, your mouth full of flowers.
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