body suspended on the salty surface, on a water that, to taste-buds is indistinguishable from tears or sweat, slips between chapped lips sloppily painted nails adorning toes pointed in dancer-ly form so as not to disturb the ocean’s steady rhythm or break it’s delicate surface coarse hair melts into bull kelp, dark and ballooning until all that there is exists in a liminal space between the inky irises of a girl and the fading brushstrokes of island sky
the crows that pepper the summer sky fly east over the cemetery’s practiced silence as if some cosmic agreement has been reached the crows refrain from their usual loudness, an ode to the absence of mourners and the sinking of the sun’s sultry yoke i like to imagine that, once their previous visitors are forced from their grief into dreary routine, ghosts gather to comfort and accompany each other in their solitude as if their lack of physical form somehow brings them connection to each other as if their material lightness really dispels any burden that comes with the human body as if, to spite their own nothingness, they are relieved of the pain that comes with being i wish i believed in ghosts.
the rosy, fragile skin punctured by crooked teeth taste buds relishing the sweet flesh of fresh fruit i watch juice drip from the corners of her mouth and down her chin and think of the bliss that comes with disregard for how you are perceived as the sticky sap leaves streams and valleys streaked across her sunscreen-smeared complexion
swaddled in velvet evening solitary shoes cradle uneven asphalt adorned with gum, molded into the ground by less cautious heels the air feels plump and overstuffed as if i could fall and my inelegant body would be met with lush, pillowy clouds of smoke that linger from summer wildfires fated to melt into familiar fragrances