she was a lover, my isla. I fed her my dreams, and we together drank shadows. we were fairy light and pixie dust, we were lighter than air. I don’t write her name with a capital letter (not ever) because I know she wouldn’t want me to. Capitals are too big and broad for her [...]

The air licks my legs like popsicles, and, peach and lime, I freeze outward in.

She’s stayed close by, mole-girl, digging tunnels in the way she’s been carefully shown. Light-blind, she reaches out scoop-hand by scoop-hand tracing home routes anew from below. I come home above ground, shadow-cheeked and dirt-poor, with one notebook and a string in my hand. Fumbling, I reach for the switch in the dark, untuck the [...]

For Katie I wonder how it happened, the carbon monoxide. Like an old man, maybe, his back bent from carrying sugar bundles on his shoulders: they piled up so high they rot-dissolved his spine melted it like teeth in coke (the way they showed to us in grade school). Or if not like him, then [...]

for Katie, rip September it happened in her sleep (they say) on a faded couch, or maybe it was new. I think there were tulips, white ones (but that was later) I would have brought a daisy. I met the eyes, they were blue and foggy (not like hers) and in a church where life is [...]

outside she sits, outside she sees: warm tulip light, the tree that grieves; with ink and flash, the story weaves her painting bright on turning leaves.

I did see you, curled up like a cat in the second row, your grey paws crossed. I saw you wince when I couldn’t remember the words, And flick-frown in that tongue-tip corner way you do. It’s funny, really, because I love cats, but you aren’t one to slip and sleek around my calves. Instead, [...]

You look at me crisply as the world blurs out around us, your eye filled with pictures I try vainly to see. Do you not see the colors spilling together? I want to jump into a river in winter, feel the ice freeze my bones. I want to run into an intersection, hear the horns [...]

She sits on the toilet, seat down, and pulls her feet up onto the lid so that no one will know she is there; then she takes the magazine out from under her shirt and lifts it to her face, breathing in the glossy pages.

Why did you come, exactly, to sit beside me in my reading room? to commandeered my precious, dust-edged volumes, with the oily boot-trails of your fingertips? In one gold-button moment, you annex Worlds as if they’re stamped with mortgages and wax; but those are veins you coil up, pack away, those flags are memories you [...]