The dark house sits brooding, high on the hill;
heedless of time passing, of age and decay,
my love walked its halls—he’s roaming them still.

*Dedicated to my five-year-old self

It’s always me
in my carrot cake tweed jacket
its caramel collar taut around my neck
speckled with goosebumps

It’s the first thing they tell you in Temporal Navigation 101:

Time is water,
But it knows no gentle ebb,
Only the rage and riot of rapids.
You can’t go back, the Temporists say;
The currents are too strong.

Early in the morning
I can hear my neighbor’s TV
Reverberating through the tin foil
Walls of her FEMA trailer

(taken from 2020s advertisements)

it’s written in the stars:
the ingeniously simple
magnetic mechanism
of the making process —

The earth tears at her concrete visage
until she can breathe through the cracks.

Listen to the viscous vows of retaliation
she presses through her stuffed throats:

zephyr sings a lullaby into my body
that she may light my eyes and dulcify my tongue

don't listen to her—
⁠the aphorism of my stomach roared in hurt
and reluctantly, i was submerged in its words:

Those who know tell us it will rain for days
as the west burns in the unrelieved heat of the sun –
all of this beyond our control thanks to the willingness
of a handful to profit by whatever means possible.

I want to show you the beach
that has been with me since I was in utero.
Now I carry it inside me in my turn:
the rocks, the barnacles with their
fronds and sharp edges,

I was thinking today of a
world without traffic lights
where pushing the button
on the dashboard for recirculated air