Rona

15

i.
in May we ditched third-period Spanish on the first proper day spring could call its own,
and with Ben & Jerry’s dripping down our chins you said something stupid, something that felt like parentheses with nothing in between,
something like "the sky matches your eyes" or "I love you" or "there’s ice cream on your nose."
instead of replying, I handed a dollar and nickels to Sam with the cardboard Sharpie sign on the corner of 6th and Salmon.

ii.
final exams led to me sprawled behind a Volkswagen in the parking lot
the wind felt like rhododendrons adrift on the ocean, I remember:
plenty of quiet for the clanging.
at four-fifteen, you with your rusty squeaky bike, tasting like sweat and wintermint gum.
June with cliff swallows swooping above, gas exhaust biting at our lungs,
sun streaks kissing the tops of glass buildings where balding white collars spent nine to five:
all-American dull middle-aged corporate drones, we laughed and vowed never to let our bones drain, fingernails bled dry, for a white-post-fence split-level and a Golden Retriever.

we drank coffee without sugar + burned our tongues and you wrote too many letters that all ended the same: I love you I love you I love you I love you so much my ribcage is smashed in
and I can’t breathe, helpIloveyouI’mdrowning;

iii.
love should be tough and madness and snapped pinky toes at six a.m., I exhaled
the day after Independence when you folded inside bus 43 to Milwaukee and for four weeks
while you taught nine-year-olds lanyarding and which creek to find the best salamanders to stuff into the neighboring cabin’s sheets,
I could pretend you were a ghost underneath my eyelids//there’s something romantic about the dead//
the July heat felt like porcelain, I spent noons writing poetry not about you but instead
someone who would admit 5.6 liters of blood is all the human body’s got and in calculus there is a limit but only on Fridays. (if I squinted and caught my breath at the same time I could think this one was you)
(so I did)

iv.
August you came back with a sunburn and texts from Sofia-in-charge-of-the-horsie-girls,
every night after I tried to find tears but came up with only a hollowness because here’s what I kept under my jaw, a melody you don’t want:
maybe all we know is from magazines snuck from your dad’s bottom drawer and trashy movies about vampires and veins, love is painful but if I socked you in the face it wouldn’t be romantic.
back in June, we’d promised to go watch a film noir from ‘62 on the last day of vacation but
I went to Somerset Aquatics, pressed my knees against the chain-link fence, watched chubby boys splash their sisters, toddlers waddle with floaties, imagined that the air was of cloves and whiskey sour, but actually chlorine that stung my eyes.