she’s a body of untouched wire and hem, smoke and chalked flags. chafes in brown grass where the redwood locked and fell, molding and contouring to her fallow seat--my lady’s sinking ship, never rescued: she never needed.two hard eyes beating reaching for a liftoff moment where the oxygen blued her warm flesh and hydrogen kept her afloat, filmyleaf canopy, and distant swoops under twigs and little bug landings above her trestled collar “hello there, little friend.” a bent cassock, his shoes by her bed, neatly folded and a dull arm plied between her willowwhite and ribcage, another bird crushed open to its ruby coronary, where she could see his little defected clicks and warmly hold his hand (but not for long, his last stretch of paved fire is about to end) humming nameless songs. what does she wear? terse reminders of distance:scorned lint with which she rooms, where he may never find it, not that he would notice; there’re different stories he can never broach, never pierce with even the sweetest offering because of his lamed and unseen love never recovered. no, he is a little droning snowflake. great wool strands warm her and swim for her skull, that coffer lined with shy tinsel(she never forgot; a few stowaways and the brave rigid resistance to seasickness). there’s an empty she’s been lovingly feeding, fetching bits of fried eggs and fishbones in babylon bowls--saves up for a whole week and smashes her furniture for hours, lifting their shoulders high over her head and sculpting as god meld her time to another’s, without even a question her hands were ingrown to poplars twins rotting to infected kindles. small, clean, and virtuous, but acidic and lovely. she speaks in doubles, in mirrors--checks the back to see if anything was left behind, perhaps her cellphone and inquires dully of how that happens, and allows a sliver of her mouth under the cardoor. tantalus, her pettied devotee, moves for a long while before settling down and realizing the whole broadcast in her lungs, the holesignal he skipped. she’s chains and upstairs, children kissing under her supervision and lamenting the sand not in her hair, not burying her happily at some cliff watching facular dandelions disperse with a splash into the hightide. the breeze has tapered off, and i am left here to smell the sweat and bones of your absence.