Audio: Read by the author.

One by one as they burned out we
Triaged the light bulbs to priority slots

Around the house. The bedroom still
Held a candle for us. The walls stayed

Rented white. I can take almost
Anything at this point. The waking

Wince of morning, which is afternoon, which
Is like someone holding tightly your hand

While you’re wearing a ring. The kitchen litigates
Our unreturned dishes. The birds have not yet

Learned to mimic our phones, but coolly master
Car alarms & the dog’s longing. Baby, paradise

Will be a house without linoleum floors, edges
Puckered up like an open carton of milk,

Its origami lip. All I need to know is
The time of day & the names of

The regulars. Not their names, but what
They drank: old-fashioned, car bomb, purple rain, dirty

Skyy. Showing up is a full-time job where the
Paycheck is a paper ghost tendering the wrong

Kind of zeros. It was the year of the drought.
Our stacked cash never laid flat. We pulled

One bright twenty & kept it rolled like
A rumor. A season fleshed out by what fell:

Ice into a glass, a dress onto a floor, a girl
Into a grind. Once, a boy off a fourth-story roof.

What you get is to be changed. Nothing
From the sky for weeks & then—; I poured

Everyone & myself a drink. All of us were taken
With leaving town. By which I mean:

We were taken with not leaving. The town took
As fact we’d be back. It’d all be here waiting

To step into, like a dress, or a downpour: the house,
The glass, the time of day. Even the boy, come

Back as a bird, thin beak tilting at every
Wind-felled scrap: what-was-That, what-was-That.

The night downtown blacked out, we walked
Out of the bars, unbanked, as if it were the first

Snow, arms raised to catch—what—on our skin. I felt it
Melt into me anyway. I’ve trained my wrists to carry more

Than I can carry. A malfunction of lightning bugs, the tight
Fists of peonies demanding their rights, the delinquent

Quiet, the lip-bitten memory of when we first learned
To lie, brick by brick. What was the time. That hour

Slipping itself up under my shirt. I can take anything.
Our currency is we stood outside of everyone else.

I open all the windows & doors because I do, in fact,
Want to air-condition the whole neighborhood. I want

To bring it all down a dozen degrees until even the churches
Of our enfolded hands are cooled & congregationless & still

Possible. My sleep put each next day on layaway until
The once-too-many: I came back & you did not.

How could I even touch it. Your love like
An orange wedge breaking apart in my mouth.

The sky touches the birds & the birds keep
Their distance, faking thirst & emergency.

It’s no stretch for us to see how anybody—in the right
Light—surely will confess to something they didn’t do.