DesertKitton

They told me: before it was the City of Lights, before the artists and artistes, and poets, with their poverty, brought the rich with their taste for bohemia - no, even before that, reaching back beyond when Romans added Latin to the aural landscape of magpies and rustling plain trees - there was an island in a swamp. And fishermen, still known to Hemingway in his day, but gone by mine. And then the Seine changed its course. They didn't tell me why, only that it did and thus a city grew. And since I learned this, I've been thinking while walking - hours and hours, just to see if, somewhere, there is a real city, if the

he rolled off me and said "consider that 'to-be-continued'" he rolled off me and said "no one can find out about this, by the way" he rolled off me and said "it's been a really long time for me, you know?" he rolled off me and said "weird. your nipples are brown" she rolled off me and said "i think inviting you into our bed will really strengthen our relationship" and then he rolled off me and said "don't tell her i came, it might mess up our relationship" he rolled off me and said "that wasn't so bad, was it?" he rolled off me and said "you're a natural" he rolled off me and said "wish my girlfriend would do that" he rolled off me

While you slept, legs twitching with your sighs, you missed a sudden storm that soaked your alleyway and clouded the open window in your living room with the loud steam of summer evaporating off asphalt. You missed me escaping a nightmare with a cry and nearly falling out of your bed as your cat ran off, offended. You missed my stifled laughter every time you snored. You missed the soft dark hours I spent drifting towards you, and the thirty minutes we spent sleeping with noses and foreheads touching. You missed the closest I've ever been to you, and you missed how afraid I was, so I suppose it was best you slept after all.

I asked if this was going somewhere - crossed my fingers under the table, blinked twice, and - and maybe I was a bit too specific. Too demanding. I mean somewhere is kind of a lot to commit to, right? Somewhere could be two seats in the upstairs of the neighborhood Starbucks, could be smoking on the the front stoop of your building, could be inside jokes at a half-full bar on a weeknight, could be France for fuck's sake. I should have asked, instead, if this was going anywhere. You know, left it open. Anywhere could be anywhere, anywhere is so much more inviting; anywhere is where you make it, where ever you want to go. With

I will remember you this way: with the purple summer city sky and the park trees behind your sloe eyes heavy blinking – the sprinklers clicking in place of cicadas – the water cools the air into a damp current, an eddy more than a breeze to carry your sweat and smoke to me where it breaks over my face like rain on glass – and the space between us is already so full, spicy-sweet with the smell of the slow car-crash-and-burn that will come so quick – and overflowing with silence like the breath before “I don’t know what to say.” So that before I lean in now to kiss that face in my mind good b

1 Green grass turned golden yellow, because the sun is most intense after rain, and I'm sitting in the midst of its waving with you, the sweeping wind off the water already having dried the hilltop. It's the time of the summer when the field is only grass. Too early for sweet pea and chamomile, too late for dandelions. High summer, arcing over us like the near-full moon riding through the glare of this sky. You have the end of a stalk of new hay in your teeth as you recline on one elbow, the wind blowing your hair into a sweep that follows the cut of your jaw, your eyes squinting against the light, your skin glowing with the last of the afte

I dreamt two figures bound back to back with their own overgrown hair tangled 'round locked wrists. They crouched naked in the dark, painted by lines of sweat running through the grime of a long imprisonment and the soot of torches - their only light. Each figure's eyes were wide and gaped into the smoke and guttering black, unseeing, yet bright with terror at the visions they chased into deep corners; the granite dome low above them, a Lascaux of horrors projected there by fevered eyes and fire. The close dark of their cave rang with screams as time and again each fought to tear itself from the other. They were insensibl

The dust rag runs over the desk calendar counting three weeks since last you left her, treading over these tiles in wan light - tiles mopped now. As she dusts and polishes the warm wood of the nightstand where your hand gripped hers gripping it, your scent is being boiled out of the sheets. Her skin is scrubbed clean of you, her hands raw from scouring out the spots you left. She folds down the coverlet and slides into cool white linens. Asleep with parted lips she dreams, and the dream leaks out of a part of her she cannot clean. It spreads across her pillowcase, pools - reinfests her body, her bed with your decay. To l