60

Face wash in the kitchen sink across from a small bag of green onion and eggplant, murmuring. Speak. Don’t speak. Don’t pause. The exactitude of my writing is a three-point turn, inconsequential movement toward rest, its failure to name being something to try to find measurement in. And if not measure, what do these words add up to? Could be six extra limbs. Could be three more mouths. Could be, but what of when being dissolves into a finger?

Ruler, timestamp, word count, message—send. Don’t park there without the right sticker. The moon rises next to mars and another planet doesn’t twinkle. Last year I thought I’d seen Saturn rising over the sunset, only to watch it grow into an airplane. Don’t speak so fast, don’t talk. Don’t fall asleep in the midst of speaking. I fell asleep in your arms and woke up there, not knowing. I drove the same passage of road to read you. I asked, and you answered a song of stars, a galaxy, valentine’s day spent by the ocean making out in a car.

Lips move and the numbers add up. A whole mouthful is packed into a small jar and placed before you, before language cracked on the fault line between here and LA. One month teeters over, then another. A science is formed in the space between two hands. Bits of sediment break off in a resuscitation of a forgotten collection of love songs from high school, not homesickness exactly, but a catalogue of longings for what was before the winter. A pause, pockets drenched in sand.

People develop their own code that pulls them together. Little language of less than a year’s time. Is the ocean the same as the ocean, does the metaphor still read, lingering in blue?