1. 

I felt around to find that it was the thought of you long and sanded smooth and firmly pressed: letting
gates opening to heal you within the surface of my skin, a combination of brackish water and amoeba, like girls ordering painful diseases online to make themselves thinner I didn’t wait, but made a place for you to enter.

I was looking into the girls, their rapid bodies, trying to make a fixture of my gaze, to make it gradually grow limp

You were freshly flushed with light, and like driving at night or pulling me across the surface of a pool or a large tiled industrial kitchen on smooth wheels, or rolled like a ball down long hallway at school

Evergreen, pine, spruce or cedar, was it a bush with long needles or small tree, left quivering?

Each needle attached with a bit of white paper and a black seed it had grown from, we would go deep in from behind it, look for the longest one to pull it. Sometimes we only took the first half of a needle

other times I would pull the whole branch, which was surprisingly tender, into a long bend

I left it attached but pushed it out,  extending  farther and farther until it touched you,
a hundred hollow spindle-sharp tips

and then upon release, it thrashed back
it's own body left ringing

Behind a broken concrete stoop, you would bend over. Even your pubic hair was golden inflected with brightness.You lay in the flower beds up against the house, pressing your half clothed body into the grass and broken branches, you lay there and I stood silent, to witness,

you softly glisten

I took a fistful of the blackened wet dirt and pressed it through my fingers

The needles were matte, a green that looked like it had been mixed with milk, your skin redden slowly and I whispered behind you, enchantments to wrap around something never intended to be held

A stiffness I only felt with you after
You were spent and ready to move forward, while I was still trickling my own, very new wetness, mixing with salt into the impression you had pressed into the ground

I struggled then with everything, especially washing my hair. After I would shower I would sit in front of the heating vent still wet and wrapped in a towel

I wanted the interstitial space to open up and become meaningful, to let me stay and start a new life inside this washed and creamed middle

one where I still was forced to do things, but they were more like the things you did when I watched you lay and twist only deep muscle around your spine digging your body deeper and deeper into the ground

You told your mom first, and I pretended I did not care when we had to stop, like I hadn't known from the beginning

I worked on it hard-toothed a kind of leather and chewed texture, iron escaping the sides of my bitten cheeks

Went to school with pine needles. They stuck through my pocket and scraped my legs as I walked in circles around soften elastic tar blacktop

It was throughly and haptically forgotten

I emptied them on the ground

If I fished you back out than I would be forced to say what I thought about the economy of unlisted still very present images of you, luscious and whole, a body like mine, yet different, exposed

so instead I let your attention and your body slip through me and then out and away becoming a kind of curtain, holding, concealing and then with the suddenness of weather, moving

I wrapped my arms around another woman. I wet my finger. I used my mouth.

We could and we couldn't do anything

She didn’t request the pine needles, but bleed softly like something punctured and now I avoid with a new kind of spring and summer-refreshed commitment anything remotely red or properly, deeply sudden, what threatens to become transparently sour