dawn seashore mango Italy turtle

You think about turtle time and tell me I walk too fast, that dawn is licking the horizon and if I get there too soon I'll catch on fire. I hold you in my hands and you curl up inside yourself like a turtle, arms tucked over your heart, silent whispers soaking into your knees. I remember our weekend on the seashore, how the light at dawn reflected in the sand and made our footprints seem even darker. The first sun rays were so free you had to capture them with your eyes so your pupils were ripe mangoes, and when I lifted my hands to shade them, you stopped me and let rivers form on your cheeks. You told me that in Italy there are women at bakeries with dough stuck to their fingers, flour on the sides of their noses. You said you feel like that when you're waiting for me to wait for you, like everything you touch sticks and weighs you down, your wedding band caked and the cracks in your palms white as the sand when dawn has left. We wish she wouldn't as we watch her, skirt hiked above the knee, lips sweet as mangoes tasting the ocean air, more sugar than salt in the mornings. You tell me she can find us in Italy too, but she always seems farther away. I turn around once to see if you're finally close, but all I find is a shell on the ground and the skin of a mango, drying in the midday heat.

too early 9/9 justwrite

There are numbers on my eyelids, counting down while I sleep in a shallow shell so the trucks grumbling outside my window at four seventeen in the morning cause me to run across highways with nine lanes and wonder why it's so hard to keep from crying out when all you want is silence for a while, crystal champagne flutes beheaded from their stems while a cool breeze traces its despair onto my neck. I expect the worst but only find seeds scattered across my palms. Seeds some day grow more seeds, and I wonder how we can know this and still feel alone, as if everyone else is constantly distracted by something flashy on the horizon in the opposite direction, and sound can only travel backward so your screaming never warns them. A distant voice waits in the doorway and tries to convince you that everything will be all right, but it has poison on its lips and hasn't realized it yet. But there are windchimes, and the only poison I've tasted lately is in the seeds of apples that only want to grow more apples that will hang heavily on tender branches that bow to the wind.

super happy group justwrite

Cloudless skies fill your sad eyes like the steam from my tea fogging my glasses an a message on the mirror after you shower, fingerprints like the dampness of morning, dew like lace on your lips. I leave the spiderwebs in the corners of my room because home is so dusty I can't see my reflection. I form shapes out of fog, people with four legs and no ears, and I know I can't watch them walk away, which is really floating because footprints I can follow feel like you're still near me. The wind is your heartbeat, so I walk backwards through snow until I lose myself and wonder how many hours I spent thinking about myself and how little I truly know about myself, except in those moments when the flies are daydreaming, fat and lazy on the empty picnic table, and I think of photographs bent at the corner and six faces looking in slightly different directions. The grass is like ice today. Your eyes are like ice today. The clouds flew from them and finally found the sky that wants to be the ground that wants to be the sky and the horizon in between in just happy, and I look at you and see happy. My sunset melts into your moonrise, and the stars are jealous of this recipe, cutting skin with the sharp edges of their light, then blocked from view by mist so thick my grandmother would call it soup and I wish it's warm soup that will fill her bones with summer air or smokey firewood but there's too much dust blocking her doorway.

super tired first Hampshire nightwrite

My muscles are tired from crying, from lack of sleep, from laughter as the katy-dids outside pretend they are birds and I stare at my life piled in the corner of the room, wondering if it's always been such a mess but the room was so big I didn't notice. I notice now like my fingertips notice the stubble on your cheek and my hands realize they're probably never going to grow any longer. I had my palm read once, in the back of a classroom, but now I'm staring at the place where the land turns to sky, amazed that it's claimed its own identity, sure more than ever that I am part of the horizon. My lips are turning blue because I blew you so many kisses I ran out of air, swallowed leaves like they were nothing at all and pretended I was a tree, a maple, a sugar maple because all I want is to taste like something you'll remember, watch myself dissolve on your tongue and forget that I could ever be measured. I'm leaving my window open at night so I can learn what it is to be cold, but the ice never falls and all the snowflakes have already melted rivers into my veins, stained the last ninety-six pages and realized something has shifted and nothing will ever be the same except my heartbeat and the katy-dids and the sugar beneath my skin.