midwestern tourists with white socks pulled halfway up their calves in polo shirts with muted tones. Deep in exchange with drug-addled tokens of lost rave days, negotiating mouthfuls of tentacles. A sentence escapes, directions and change and ten salutations to old mischief and gods lasso’d from plants and sci-fi pages.
Foreign travel informs other language encounters, avoided with translation devices churned active with charades. Just like overseas both parties are nervous, and then someone takes a picture and buys a doughnut.
My eyes on the mother, stout firm and grounded from three children sliced from her body. She won’t offer her tale unless asked, and then it’s all getaway cars and field goals and journals inked thick with secrets. This woman won’t hug like she’s been interrupted. She’ll press her breasts into mine until they grow.
Her male counterpart something else all together, propped around wars and his grandfather’s wars and the job he was supposed to retire from until he didn’t. A camera saluting the labors of silver miners, his hands those of harvest. His wife will graduate to crone without having been abandoned, but if he’s asked who he is he won’t answer.
Meanwhile the ravers recall friends, all dead, who once occupied pants with enough fabric for two and filled dance floors with movements that would better serve some city, before one was left to foam her overdose alone so no sick sort suffered prison. Big city burdens bruising small towns long after notions of illegal dancing.
At twenty it’s not possible to measure the collection of bodies and faces and pick which hand will pull the card of cancer, will avalanche all the way down the mountain with no memory of bodies to cushion them. Image preserved of a cloud kicked up by two cowboys who never knew horses, stamping time in high desert lines while my tent became shelter for lizards. Daytime heat would force our retreat under mushroom canopies, then night resurrected lost thunder. We listened without hearing the warning.
Some went without gravestones in favor of ash recalling dormant volcanoes. Other shells had one autopsy, two, with neither revealing an answer. Others assume phantom forms to warn big eyes away from empty houses. Names and faces preserved through clothing artifacts collected in a bag, honoring a time when tshirts stopped short. Robots and aliens stitched in homage to sounds, silked with sweat and ringed in candy.
If they ask who I am, I won’t answer. A sugar different from the offering of this city, stolen from plants and sci-fi pages.