How to Unfold a Memory

A wink and a crooked smile.

Chorus of cracking knuckles, a concert of injuries.

The fireflies, bats, June bugs and I we all saw you watching.

The cricket stripped grateful for the Angels share like "goddamn, this air tastes delicious".

Speaking of bourbon, Kentucky was barrels on barrels, an old-fashioned "yes, please" cornmeal fried catfish.

Clocks with Roman numerals and the street lamps, wha, the street lamps!

Wraparound porches, the porch swings, the American flag...

Look I know there is nothing romantic about colonialism, but there was something about that architecture right that whispered sticky-sweet nothing and I was stuck in the roundabout.

I was inside looking out, finally see I had been going in circles, swallowing words.

Dizzy, I had to lie down before the church at midnight.

I had to lay time flat and still the treetops. Fireflies, bats,June bugs and I, we all stood watching the go ships of light sail the sea sky.

Silent-treatment, the fantastic devastation of unwanted silence that heavy slink. How it hangs with purpose the mean easy.

My tongue is well-trained in the sit still, it's my hands that can't keep a secret.

My legs too eager to run into the music, so I went looking for our bridge to burn, and a riverbank to drown the flames to stifle the heat.

Kentucky was hot, all barefoot, blue flame and I wouldn't see. I could see the music, but the music couldn't see me. Bare bone, wind chime, bear skin, dunked in full moon feelings.

Swimming pool, daydreams, the sticky hands of lust tiptoeing, earthquake how it was always, but never the right time.

One might have found me akin to a scoop of ice cream atop soda pop bubbles light as air without care for the impending melt.

I plucked a daisy in Kentucky.

It told me that you loved me, so I left your love there. There in the dancing around, dancing through dancing on the spot where I buried my expectations and the wanting of it all.

You know the truth hurts less when it is not parading around in front of us.

Love, the great and handsome terrible beast, traced me back to it by a trail of smoke.

See I only doused myself in gasoline when you handed me that match because I was tired of being a metaphor.

I mean, why is it always about burning? We never did find that bridge, never burned it down.

In Kentucky there is a pile of bricks I could not use to measure the space between us. I don't bother trying to do that anymore.

There's this condition called the rapture of the deep. It's when a deep-sea diver spends too much time at the bottom of the ocean and cannot tell which way is up.

You have always been asleep in a different bed in the same room.

Kentucky felt like impossible nostalgia, and I saw you looking back. That's it, I remember. I saw you looking back because I was looking forward, and my jaw was a clenched fist I could not throw because the truth hurts loudest when you toss it around.

And the echo... the echo is what drives girls like me mad with remembering.