I have your photograph to remind me of the city lost in an earthquake. You never knew my name, or my place, or really, who I was but I know so much about you that I keep these little things within a pressed book and carry it through my worldly travels.

The winter garden of the backyard is devastating near the end of summer. Spiders crawl in frantic circles along the crowded, still-spaced vines and leaves while the pond sputters through its eaves of dirty rocks. The same water, recycled, replenished weekly, still dirty brown-bottomed with leaves floating on the surface protecting the fish.

The roof is still moist from all this rain, and I’m still clogged with summer weeds, so I bend my knees to the hard bodies of the singing crickets at night, while you keep wondering out-loud why I wont let you touch me.

Last night you called and you whispered my name into your phone so I could barely hear, barely notice. You repeated it slowly and I came to life, watching the cold moon from the roadside, feeling the gravel beneath my feet. I wanted to tell you to not care, to settle beneath the weight of your orange books and follow the traffic lines to downtown streets but your eyes are so.. so everything. You keep finding ways to dig yourself further into my memories; the way you keep stealing my poetry book to riddle your own meandering meanings between the already torn pages. Your fingers chalked white from sidewalk creations, sitting next to my knee at the heel of the great mountains surrounding the valley of the city- and you, clumsy boy full of smiles drifting over the trees searching for star-shaped leaves to hand to me, to let go, to make wishes from man-made falling stars.


and somehow I will forget to move away.

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