The Fifth

Day one said we didn't have to wear shoes

Bone white toes curled in shallow cold

water sloshing from a pail.  Now

We don't go when the tide is out

So we don't go at all

bound up in books, careers

Water still there though no

one is looking.

On the second day we donned black ties

Polished like our hair. Jostled 

a resume with clammy palms for hours on end and then

your mother heard you cry for the first time in a while. While 

I sobbed for four years straight.

On the third day we crawl.

Age has not treated us kindly. The

Return is slow, we envy even 

Barnacles, creeping 'cross the dull shine. 

The common blight of dawn breaking

Oceans on our skin and bleeding

Out or bleeding in.

The pill is sour, it tastes of death. Metallic

on the fourth day. You 

are gone, wriggling in the the morning sun. We 

say we are young and hold each-others tongues 

with our teeth. 

On the rocks or underneath the tide

somewhere in the pools brimming with life. 

Your shirt was red, I remember

But day five brings nothing.

Forgotten prose from late August

Summer passed. I lost the last tendrils of it today, trailing off with packed up books and the things my life doesn't have room for anymore. Time dragged June out of me like a splinter, quarantined with the neat outline of my past, printed on a fraction of the map I know like a woman you buy a drink but never sleep with. July was about the same until anxiety pumped my eyes wide open to the coyness of time's glacial slip, and I was surrounded by dry land for miles, where there used to be towers of ice. After that I slowed down a little, kissed my parents, bought a few books, and somewhere between Salter and Hemingway summer swelled then expired.

Last night I dreamt I got into my car only to find a dead woman, her discolored skin hung on a skeletal frame sagging like it would melt off. For some reason she didn't alarm me. I buckled her seatbelt for her and drove the corpse around town, as if it were typical, though I was slightly concerned with the smell of her decomposing flesh. I only remember the dream because today, when I sat in my car, I panicked briefly once more about the fictional odor. 

It's funny how things come back to you. 

There's this Croatian band that I used to listen to, wandering along the cliffside's teetering rocky paths that crusted the Mediterranean island where I spent summers as a child. Recently I played one of their songs and was disarmed by the distinct sense that everything is temporary, so chronologically shackled to fragments of the things we used to experience. I feel that summer in my bones sometimes; the abandoned elementary school and cola with wine, walking home in the night to sails clanking and swaying and just swaying along with them. Now it's gone like this one, rotting still, with all the poems I hid in places I don't visit anymore. 

dream 1

In November we walk the short span of the wall that stands white 

and divine that sometimes it's a flag 

so we climb it instead

I know you're good at climbing because I've seen you in pictures

I just kind of hang

There's this telephone a ways up in case of emergenc y

your hand on the receiver 

your fingers not lost upon me

pushing H-E-A-V-E-N  in numbers

[dial tone] "I thought so,"

you laugh and we go 

on towards the billowing sheet

When we get high enough

its all wind,

pulling hair from my eyes and mouth

you smile as my teeth fall out I smile 

at your eyes but I can't quite 

remember them 

until you let go

of my grip