your carapace is an inky blue, mine an olive green. We float the Gulf of Mexico for years, hunt tiny mussels, detritus, and oysters until one day a Great Blue Heron lifts you away.
We’re carnival workers who meet in a dusty tent in a circus in Des Moines. You’re a carney, obnoxiously punctual and aggressive. Your wife will have just run away with a brush salesman. You find me in a dusty tent wearing silver sequins. I will have spent years hopping trains after a gypsy in the Delta finds the Sun Line of my left hand to be clear, deep, and unbroken.
At one point, we’re sunflowers in a field where humanity has all but ruined the earth. Most of the trees are gone but here we are, beaming heliotropics. With the autumnal chill, our petals will dry to a shade of spilled coffee. Our bodies will curl into themselves. Someone will pass going too fast but catch sight of us and be struck at how we resemble a pair of old people, bent and dry, touching.
Tonight, we sit on the porch of your yellow Victorian with the spraypainted pink ashtray stand. You play Gregory Porter for me. I bring you bougainvillea from my garden, bum your Marlboros. You show me the constellations and the international space station on that app on your phone. We’ll break up because you invited the woman across the street to have beer, because you were jealous that I mentioned another man’s name, a man you perceive to be more my type. Still, you drive by my house every day on your way home from work. Eventually you give up and marry the woman who parks her Nissan Sentra in the wrong direction in front of your house. You outlive her by a decade, astonishing for someone who smokes a pack a day. I marry a man who sleeps on his side of the bed.
I dream you in an empty room surrounded by photographs and two white chimneys, that we float a dark river on our backs late at night, that you’ve drawn cylinders and stars on my bedroom wall in conte crayon, that you say, Look, Mars— southwest in Virgo’s eye…
