one-bedroom apartment

sometimes the mail is addressed to you

the foreign swoop and dive of the alphabet

someone just jumbled the envelopes and here you are again

lounging in the mailbox with the termites

their golden bodies sneaking across the black

and reading the postcards,

skimming the curves of a lost soul’s pen--

Greetings From Far Aways and

I’ll Be Seeing Yous

today the air is thin and cold

the old man on the porch across the way

sits with his knees too far apart

as he sucks the end of an old cigar

and the smell of spitty cardboard and wet matches

lands on my tongue, creeps up my throat until

it meets the smell of rain-tainted moss,

so today is a pumpkin-rotting October night

instead of a flowering May evening

a shiver runs beneath my skin,

skin peppered in sun’s laughter

but white in the slant of this wan light

and i walk to the mailbox, hoping to see your name

scrawled on a letter, probably from an insurance company

BETTER RATES, APPLY NOW

or some postal lie assuming your clothes still hang here

but instead it’s only my familiar alphabet

so i shuff through junk and return to senders

and wish for a whisper from you

breakfast

the grapefruit clamped between your teeth oozes

pulpy liquid, pooling in the wormy lines of your chin

your pinkish tongue dancing and careful

to catch every droplet before it swims to the corners

of your pursed lips, stinging with citrus

the saccharine paths clear in the morning sun

filtering through the white curtains

crystalline drops lingering on your face,

your paleness quiet and impossible

the blood beneath your skin blue like stormy ocean

the juice beads like pearls, tracing the veins in your neck,

ebbing with each concentrated swallow

dribbling down your cheeks and creeping into your collarbone

where your white skin congeals in puddles,

rippling with each splip of bittersweet nectar

it collects in your palm like water in stone

and reads your fortune, rolling in fat drops

through the maze of your lines

plinking over the side and coloring your wrists rosy

sappy sweet in the crook of your elbow

you slip your tongue around your mouth

you rub your pinky over those too-crowded teeth

your young voice is tinny like pennies in a soup can

and you say you can feel that filmy acid eating away at your enamel

you grimace at the taste 

the dew, drying sticky on your face and fingers,

drips from your slight smile and splatters onto your knee

like the first raindrops on white sidewalk,

crawling into the crevice of your crossed legs, steady and daring

i am not shading you in pink and red

not sketching you in sugar water
i am looking at your oceanstorm eyes and hoping they will look back

instead you watch the windows and draw juice from the fruit

i chew on my thumb until it bleeds cherry