At some point he would walk to her, or she would walk to him. Maybe they would walk to each other. Or maybe this was a dream, an entirely reasonable performance of the unconscious mind. She would think, upon waking, that was something. But it wasn’t anything, not yet. She was still deciding who she would be, and he was deciding too.

When I remember my mother happy
I go back to her emerging from brambles,
a loaded bucket keeping her from dancing.

She waves to them, smiles even in her sleep,
never learned to cook, lost her hair in
menopause, uses a cane for mushroom
hunting even when on wet days the tip
sinks in with the weight of her limp till she’s
bound to fall on the soft ground, lying in
wet leaves and giggling like a girl.

Oxnard. Sour blueberries, a taste like the lake water from the little pond in the house where I grew up second. I’m getting better at fueling my body, not good, but this city-town is beautiful, beautiful and distracting. I’m trying to be more in the where that I am in.

I watched as bubbles rose form the submerged fruit, spilling out in columns. She tore the thing apart with her fingers, familiar and soft to me, and the cracking red skin echoed in our chipped kitchen.

I’d balance my feelings when openly flirting with the girl I’d pined after my entire junior year, while secretly hoping the hot male lifeguard I worked with would show up and notice me, catching adrenaline as I negotiated who I was in public with what I longed for in private.

I watched as you’d extend a palm beneath
A ripe banana, tenderly, as if
To ask permission. Or you’d let me tuck
Wildflowers into cleavage held aloft,
Slick, sweaty, suntan oiled, flecked with sand crumbs.

We sit quietly, the stone wall cool, the chapel shadow leaning left in front of us. We eat around the dark bruises in the white flesh. You take the pit out of your nectarine and place it between us, like an offering to the God we mock.

“What makes a soul lost?” I break the silence, and the words sink in the humidity.

I stare at the message. It says: Doofus Howser just walked in…
In my hyper-focused, hypervigilant state, this antithetical autocorrect strikes me as hilariously funny. Tremors begin to quake deep inside. I try to suppress this eruption, but I am no longer in my body. I am high above the scene watching the madwoman sitting in my chair convulse into hysterical laughter.

One purple crescent
sent into sky
where my blue cloud
wafts above, alone,
aware it’s been seen
yet lingers to be heard.