ROAM
Kira Henehan
In the interim, of course, things. For instance: I hear things spilling have spilled in blue wax and coarsened. Now fray, ragged suffer, under corner-stone frog for luck. She licked seven envelopes’ worth of my neck and down into black-spotted aria (the backdrop distracts, a child in swing oddly erotic when termed in the Greek word for ‘boy’ or ‘sand’ or ‘god’). For instance: how rope-spun hair accepts the light and fires still and golden red, embers what water would otherwise destroy. You cannot subdue it.
He washed two pills down with a shot of bourbon at the airport bar. He chose the ugliest bouquet for sale at the flower stand. The flowers if they were flowers and not cabbage resembled cabbage. Athree-headed bundle of baby. The lady said they’d been popular lately. The water familiar brackens and blues and I should be found suspect but never have they known my race of time as any more than an object over which to watch, nights. Oh bright piece, you dazzle, have done all you can with windows, have done with windows, gone through shards sharper than a thank. He is a man and alone as I. For instance: the other girl. He suspects she has been brought here to succubus him.
For instance: the cutting board. She glances at the flowers or cabbage and drags her cigarette down to the bone. She’s contraried about the years, interrupting the uninterruptible horizon, planing at the shore. His eyes are drawn lengthwise these days, orchids, magnolias, tiger-lily lethargy. She stepped men’s heads like so many riverstones to reach him and now they or possibly all of a night have combined with each of the twenty-seven words that can pass between then fall from the rickety catwalk of a moment’s pass. Out in the vineyard flicker lantern-lights. Paper-thin hued and hurrying the dusk. Never hurry the dusk. Though what falls muffles the glare, we stifle, prefer not to play the sky’s red at roulette.
A light from the can fires. Bees cleave to the center swelter, or stick. Perhaps not as bright there as hot as outer edges would indicate but still. He’d been too long away, hearkening a call to errant, and now to return, to bank up the shore, forgone; well. In the interim, of course. For example: small things like a curlbrown leaf. Oyster irritations. The girl. Please to not convince me or try. The plausible hats we wore to appear expert were left on the trellis, a third of the way up. Let’s pretend to not be the real story here; we may be accidentally artful and then. Ludicrous when taken at face value.
Blank the bare palms from vision, though their earthen rot competes against the sea and dewberrywristed women wilt ever past the terrace. She follows a man’s feint of lime, dark linger of stubble beneath. In the Burmese garden, the child with his riding crop tassels among the shrubs. Sky sheaved with ticker-tape nightingales and they attend white parties to avoid taking place anywhere. Anight ignored will reclaim what it can, in the eventual, if only two souls hidden within a shoddy cocoon.
There is nothing at last I can see.
Thus, twenty-seven good nights of sleeping. Rub your eyes with the dust until they poppy-bloom red, then you’ll know, then inject. Small good safeties waiting there on the curbside have a smell like oats or ballast; tomorrow the walk through town. Lamentably plumed, trailing careless stitches. Almost violet, she, almost absent altogether of color named. We’ve been seen, shored, sanded and absorbed into water like salt until the clear opaques and glass stubbles under skin (one can live until one’s small and blue, no solace in sustenance). Our unwound yarn: a small fail then again how hollow a hammer, how meaty the invisible fist.
The lady said they’d been popular lately and if it were funny he might have laughed: legions of men deplaning irate, picking shrunken-head spiteful bouquets. The pills do wonders until the stain the shape of Florida on the cutting board. Florida looks like the word poultry she says which is no explanation. It is hard to avail oneself to this degree of difficulty. He is cheered with city-building, underground waterways red with joyful fever. The consolation of dosages. The ponycarts patrol the surf, a plodding nightly vigil where twos participate, darkly. Lamplit cabbage-flower bedside leaks but I like being here but I at once have gone. Hatted and iced in glacial splendor (what cold, what cold bears him in) to exist of thin arm, a hip’s rise and clatter. Or cultivate a tropic lull: upon the rondelle, flamingoes. What the toads will appreciate, turning the earth (they are always) back.
She stays at the table. The colors have wronged in the interim, here lifted from lain, watered or wandered from pale strands. Here obscenely blotted, red, a color the shape of state or poultry, if packaged poultry only bled. She is drawn. She has the impermanence now of pencil. The streets shout their degrees of lonesome, every sign shot dead, the overlook cordoned off; this has been allowed.
Not on the seventh morning of the year did I not underestimate the repercussions. Leave it to elseone to sort the negatives, focus rather on curbing the impulse toward violence (the whiskey’s not pouring itself, you know) so as not to make everything broken. Envy—what?—the furloughed their freedoms, their savage parade. I see and see and see and you are. Take it in the ear. Color the cutting with pinky-tip sever. None of this is mine to know but your stray at which I might smile and so capture you back (one begins, so to speak, up top) by a flash glimpsed over face or fate; either way there is something circling, ever what the nighttime shadows. The medicines mixed, you bled and wept. We are Peleponnesian; we have intersected; we are, quite clearly, brave. In these ways we pass nights, letting.