Response.

Melon hearts

Carry dulcet tunes

Sop your face with the juice

Let it run peach and gossamer

Dripping in time to the

Vibrations up your body

From every tribal footstep

And delirious leap into nitrogen arms

Yank it down

Thundering cracked caravans

Running away

Circles and cleft palates

Splitting the fibers of the atoms

Electrons screaming for their mothers

Gnashing at the earth

They claw for her

Taste the phoenix as you rise

Soiled with the ashes of Lake Street

I know you can

Find fear’s filaments

Clogging your every pore

Life’s blood tiger blood

Trying to run

Twist yourself

Into the pretzel of the new generation

Habitually Under Construction.

Around every three minutes a car will drive by, exciting the dust into clouds that settle like a film onto the dump trucks and safety cones.

The inordinate amount of neon orange says there’s a war on Haverford. Apparently, the city of Indianapolis couldn’t go on ignoring the autonomy of the sidewalks. And now, the six o’clock reality depicts the aftermath of the battles between concrete and men at work with deep holes and orange lattice.

I feel like clay baking in this heat, but it’s a sweet heat. Overhead, the leaves of the trees softening its brutality and shading thoughts still ringing with the echoes of a conversation with someone I’m not allowed to love. 

Pearl.

The cadences of your combined voices

Tumble down several flights

Of stairs.

These walls are your parentheses,

Scooping you into a

Sentence’s secret room.

Keep the bubbles in your freezer,

And every day

Check

To see if their frosty bodies

Stayed orbular

Through the night your brother-in-law’s best friend’s roommate

Slept next to you in bed.

You fold up your life like a paper fan.

Keep up zigging

As you zag,

Tracing the fault lines

In your cardiac tissue.

Fraying.

We’re tenuous together.

Hanging side by side from her gold chain.

Three, three, two.

Peridot, topaz, amethyst.

Spread thin along the

Stairsteps of a generation.

Somehow,

Amidst every

Birthday undercurrent, every

Snap at a sound,

Every fantastical and inevitable reorganization of

Our lion-hearted loyalties,

Somehow

We’re together in Belgium.

Held up to the light,

Our gaps provide patterns for the lace

As the rays fall through.

Bright white. 

Days.

The horizon flashes in strobe.

Digging our feet into the sand, they disappear.

The breathy kiss of Tuesday

Bleeds into Wednesday.

Tumbling:

Stairsteps and inertia.

The x-ed out calendar squares inching forward

Like a worm,

Like a tortoise

Slow, steady,

Eventually winning the race.

The undertow drinks you in,

Loving the way the salt affects your chemistry.

There’s nothing human in the waves.

A barrage of glittering, summer waves.

Again and again, they’re relentless

Insistent.

Always mechanical in their abscondence

No matter how manic the embrace.