You arrive in my body in slow motion
Not a sudden sun or a flash flood
but sepsis – oil spills – slow and thick
People talk of traumas, but those are quick
lightning strikes
Scalped lives
Minds made sick by poisoned oceans

Yet you have a slow path; a bad start
Felled trees, dried creeks, bones bleached
by this morning’s first frightful light
Insidious and viscous stale piss into
exit wounds
backwards
Dragged in reverse to the beating heart

When the briar-wrapped womb couldn't bear
I should have seen the summer's end
The signs were clear: days stripped bone-bare
as Poseidon’s glass. And once we were both there
with stones on
our skin
and the middle water’s dust in your hair

We simply swam. Those shining days at sea
: the moths, the light, the ocean gardens
Shells, fish, skulls; ships to great hallowed
sleeping islands who watched our shallow
naked dives
in salt
You whispered that you loved me

I always thought that constant shore immune
to the turning fires splitting the land
Resplendant hems of stone and static waves
we took in strides, despite the grave
mirrored ebbs
and flows
of tides that don't obey the moon

And then world stops, almost as if just for us
The green and bright days with animals
A first kiss, lifted on the year's spin
as the lips split into shifting tastes
: electric
traces
grazed across our nervous sweaty shapes

This shallow in the skull is where the most
thin trail is thinnest through thick whorl
Your arms exposed to thorns are brushing
through unhurt as I’m just cut, stuck, crushing
underfoot
forlorn
wild young who howl and never stand a hope

It used to be a place to safely step
A place to dance, to love, and learn the words
of wildfires bright enough to blind me
as your hands kept me spinning. Nothing left
behind me
but light
And now we've never met