Lists

Cat. 
Donkey.
Cigarettes and dust.
Smoke from the trash heap.
Allergens.  Triggers.  Potential poison.

Dolphin.
Beach.
Hammock.
Not quite cold enough Corona.
The light in your eye.
Comforts.  Pleasures.  Aphrodisiacs.

The sweet grace
of the back of your hand
on my cheek.
Warm calves accepting
of my cold feet.
A shared bowl of yogurt and nuts,
frittata on your plate and then in my belly.
Home.

Two years ago she started to tell me
the story of the day she didn’t
drown her children in the bathtub, didn’t
starve them in the closet, didn’t
beat them until they couldn’t scream any more, didn’t
burn them with cigarettes, or the iron, or stove,
scald them with water or freeze them
with scorn.
Two years since she didn’t
leave them on their own to die
on the top floor of the old house
converted to apartments
dried by the western plains wind into
kindling, tinder, fuel.
Two years and counting . . .

Salt licks at my feet and I
remember the smell
of the sea, blown across the tidal pool.
And sweat.
Airplane sweat – tired, confined, medicinal,
metallic.
Just arrived in the tropics sweat – too heavy
clothes, socks, long sleeve shirt thick with the
smell of city and work.
Sun sweat – open to the air, coconut
with the scent of summers past
lingering youth
new beginnings.
And the sweat of lust, salt rising
sweet from your skin or
is it mine.
I sweat back the sweet salt of the sea –
as you, too, lick your way up my feet.

A crushed Coke can.
Beach glass.
High tide mark of broken shells.
A streamer of plastic bread wrapper.
Bottle tops.
Sand.  Endless sand.