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Call me like a body calls to another on long late night drives. Every breath a beacon, that red blinking light on the mountain top under billions of stars that died before we could be born. I am waiting to be taught what need tastes like, what home will make you do. Tonight let’s take the long way through the winding shadows, windows rolled down and hollow songs blasting their way through old worn speakers, across our laps and out into the wet night. I never knew you to be careless. But sometimes I wished for it. Sometimes I did it to myself. Now the vows are slipping stolen sand, a cherished vanishing. It could be the first time again, a repetitive chant in a shaky voice. Not holy, not hollow. Sticky like truth against the tongue. Mixing the buzz luck with the tiny holes, the dirt disasters. All our hands, bandages. The unforgetting regrets kept close to the knee, forest fires in the pockets. I have photographs of all of it. 412 pictures stored between ribs and muscle so that I breathe through filmy junctions developed in chemical baths. Hung to dry there, we have become still statues standing piously against the backstop of a superstition we weren’t sure enough to stop from saving us.
