TAR

     One in the morning and a storm coming. Everything bites, the wind blows with teeth and the sky shimmers an ugly bronze, the tornado color. The city is too bright. This is the color of pollution. Lamps hang in the air like fog-stars and they are the only stars. I am running down an empty path of stone, it is dry, it is opening itself up to hold the sky’s sewage in its pores. Headlights bloom over the hill and I stop and let them pass. 

     I am running shamelessly in the dark. I want the weight of your head in my hands, the nape of your neck. You walk beside me, in my chest and fingertips, against my shoulder, silent. I know you cannot remember how to speak words. This is how you are when you cry. I let you cry, noiseless. I am coming.

 

x

 

     Thunder tears the night roof open with crackles of rain like gunfire. I am scared the windows will split open and shatter from sonic force. Outside, across the stone path, the green drowns, the grass uprooted by the spillage turned black.

     I turn sticky in your bed. I am steaming like never before, the night mist has penetrated my skin like so many fine tissue layerings. I bubble profusely into a puddle and leak and leak onto you but you are asleep. I exhale. Face to face with the window I want to press my eyeballs up against the glass. I imagine its delicious iciness. Outside, the trees bow dumbly up and down and lose their limbs. 

 

x

 

      When we wake there are no tears. You gather me together and I slip in and out of the morning until it becomes noon and then late, too late, but still I am liminal. We remain this way.

      The world is all damp cherry blossoms and mud and mist when I leave. Sky makes the stone steps turn pink with the sunset behind it. I remember thick vines of water pounding, my calves pumping and inflamed and dazzled with tiny droplets drooling into my shoes. I am late for a class or a date or a meal. The air is wet and cool and I could drink it through a straw. Everything is full of something.