Don’t speak to me of your wavy hair fluffed in frayed yarn crests or your black polka dot purse with heavy buckles fit to strap medieval knights in armor, or your unborn children hanging and swelling for your painful weighted milk. We took this journey to the field of the grayed ocean filled with cool apologies empty of any meaning or contrition.

The bare grate turned black with old burnt dreams. Your whispered gossip takes me from all these stale square windows, the grinning pans over the stove, casts me where the cold sea collapses in and in on itself, crawls forward and creeps back, gives up all the ground it has taken.

Even those occasional rages thrashing wind against cliffs and tossing logs like seed pods cannot dislodge your old patterns, the rhythm you never escape, rolling toward me and then away. Your placid face flickers, illuminated then locked in shadow.