Pacific Northwest

 

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Sunlight speckled like ladybugs,

Boring into your eyes only when it sets.

 

Walk with me

Turn your heart into a blackberry

And your fingers into plums,

Catch apples in your shoulder blades

 

Trace trees from leaves to root

 

Let your feet swallow the sea until

You can no longer feel them,

They are frightened by their numbness

 

Retreat to where sea lion barks

Echo in their skeleton,

Pining at trees that outspan colonialism

 

As if two dead orcas are better than

One

 

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She used words like “wonderful”

 

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And she loved it.

Five hundred arms craning upwards and all she could think of was construction,

Beam walking and sandhill birds, she requested “kaboom” or “scrubbing bubbles”,

Of course she liked a clean house.

Breasts like moons, ribs of daffodils

And helium between her eyebrows, she made me believe that home could be built from

Unsealed letters, open bedroom door, no, her love was in the snack pack chocolate puddings,

And she said so.

Home was made of closed mouths sneaking a midnight apple, full of empty matchboxes moulding in the basement,

She loved me.

A cold thing, meals emptied and full of heavy cream. Safety is silence, pulling split ends out of follicles, a hole in the door of our house-

She loves me.