chalk troupes, for the love and taste of lime (green and rose are the sweetest, but ah! that vintage white. musky like vague drawings).

the breeze has tapered off, and we are left here to smell the sweat and bones of your absence. its mild acidity creates frills on our outer edges like dixie foibles born from hard-packed mud and the small-holed recesses of a lead-based paint crumbling away. all the little gnats fell down in one monstrous plague, their bodies holding up the entirety of this mothmold wall, tremulously feeling their withered wings for the familiar glints of asbestos-cut glass. perhaps your chapter will recruit, fill, and contort with pasty heads and well-oiled seats. they are rides, and so are we. you— you’re a golden guide burning down the tenement walls to calves and taming, sending them off to ash-hide bowls of water. sandle to stream. floating. did you know that? a light burn of the toes. the winter solstice caught us off guard and we, hand-bound to ground and roads unfamiliar, stumbled through veil after veil of stained night. "trouble us with a light?" precious, precious are the gone days of torch or bloom. we smoked our truant clothes and found hidden needles curling in our lungs, reminding us of different shapes of affection--a moth chasing a glowstick at the rockshelf between the ocean and me, lost between the strings and the big propellor blade changing the current; a half-peeled, half-crushed orange leaking out sweet blood; a patch of dead skin, but she still smelled like juniper and marshmallows. smile, echo, smile. you took us for beggars and gave us a missive tip. the coin was enough for one phone call, and we chose to call you, not speak or leave a message, and gnash our teeth quietly as you asked "who's this? hello? is there anyone there?" for a number stored as the unobtrusive "glen," we got too much attention, blushed, and embarrassedly hung up. a foreign glitch in the teams of stars that everyone noticed. glaciers pushed a few more centimeters, and we accepted the force of a drifting ghost family, shady and concerned. we were, by then, the triumph of a courtly age fixed. singe, eleanor, speak your fill! the dew and crumbs will shudder regardless, and we will be there to lap up the offering. you do love us, in your safe, reserved way. we, the county mill workers, found gold by the riverbank. we mined and forced the earth into a fiery deluge; it furied and trampled the corn crop and smoked our feet to driftwood. we, the elected jailers, sat around waiting for the busted locks to cave in and face lockjawed prims taking our gut and feed us to hungry, beady-eyed worms. a great campfire, and we stood in the middle. a light above and a light below, we howled at the moon, the moooooon. a gentle tremor through our skin, we took a few hammers and went back resetting those crooked railroad beams. you were on the tracks, sleeping: tipping your shoes to the overcast, "hiya boys, ready for curtains and hickory chips?" hungry, we stuffed our mouths with the faint summery steel.