You, a tangerine dream wearing all of my favorite flavors and stalking the edges of a fence that we crossed once, twice, and again and again, the childhood place where children can’t reach when they’re not sleeping, an empress of flavors who whispers violet rain when the sky is growing dark, and our feet are covered with seaweed.
You, an image of fever in the summer storms, a summer dream in the middle of winter, a legend tracing shadows on the necks of gods, a way of floating between here and heaven when the earth is too far beneath our feet, and the skies are not willing to open up to let us in.
You, grateful at the edges of a day, afraid to wake too soon, a soft storm in a warm hotel , making shadows across my eyebrows when we’re too moved to speak about the things that are moving us, and something in the corner moves, and your gypsy spirit starts to fill her throat with glass and she’s laughing.
You, crossing back between the rows of the cemetery where we saw something touching us, nothing touches us, nothing but us can touch us, as the ocean decides to hold its breaath before she rains on us, and reigns over us, and reins us in, laughing, and she’s laughing because we aren’t silent here.
You, teaching me irreverence and secret portals between this day and the one we left behind, making dresses from the handkerchiefs of the dead, gifts for dolls that children can’t hold in their small hands, like rocks at the end of the bed to keep from floating too far too fast, flying over our own heads in visions of ourselves made sacred, visions of ourselves like we are.
You, chasing ghosts that wake us up again and again, the ones who are waking up without bodies, jealous of our archaeologies and geographies traced after midnight, the hour that the rains come, the come seeping through the rivers of coffee spilling out of the edges between clasped fingers, tracing the hauntings of those things that are not yet born, and not afraid to die.