Hand to Heart Coordination

Adam knows that she doesn’t belong to him, but he also knows how to play this game.

She presses the soles of her feet up against his because she says they are cold. They feel so warm. He waits a moment before getting her a clean pair of socks. She puts on some soft spoken new indie breakout artist whispering about skin and breath and feelings that last forever. It's better than the tension in the silence, but he turns down the volume. She pulls on a blanket and he lays on top of it.

It’s a game and he plays it. And in the fourth quarter, on the final drive, with his moral sideline coaching drowned out by a stadium full of hormones, he leaves the huddle. After all his moves, his jukes, his carefully designed plays to keep her desirably close but appropriately far away, there is one play left.

“I’m tired,” she says.

“So am I.”

She moves a bit closer.

“I can walk you back.”

She doesn’t say anything.

Adam thinks that it would be wonderful if she didn't belong to someone else and if his bed, his name, and his memory didn't belong to him.

The Opacity of Thomas Monarch

On his twentieth birthday, Thomas Monarch
awoke to find himself quickly disappearing.

His reflection was fading and
he was rarely noticed on the street.

He was never called on in class and
he found himself continually being
ignored in social settings.

His thoughts, his words, his actions,
all diluted.

Before the week was out, he realized that
nearly all of his substance had been funneled
into the being of another, into the being of she,
into the being of her.

His deep well was now filled with transparency,
and yet his substance lived on in the deep rich opacity of her.
Where she used to be shallow and transparent,
now she was shallow and opaque with a blackberry hue,
giving the illusion of depth, of richness, of vitality.

And he, though empty, just watches birthdays
float by as he waits to be filled.