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.