sawdust & diamonds

You show me how to pitch a tent in a field of purple vetch, which wraps its tendrils around whatever it can reach: grass, twigs, itself. After the sunset, after the fire burning down to nothing, when we climb inside to fuck for the last time, I don’t know this is the last time. But you must know, you must have already decided— you make it last so long, you ask me afterwards to move away, saying I am making you too warm.

There is nothing left to do this morning besides make coffee, wedge the last two boxes in the front seat. I had expected grief, but all along I-84 there is instead a lightness: morning’s bright fingers rippling across the Columbia, fireweed still craning its many necks as I pass. How strange to be left and leaving all at once. How soft, the Douglas firs blurring in the rearview. Three days ago I drove past your best friend walking his dog, and watched as it leapt up, rested its front paws on his shoulders. I had wanted so badly to be that simple.

2014 phone selfies not the best of, but the realest of, maybe

what is it that i miss? sometimes in oregon the view out the car window was so beautiful i’d feel a sort of panic, unable to turn my head far enough, to look hard enough. trees on the mountain, light on the water. light on the trees in the water. a mountain. how many months since the last time someone told me i looked like a dancer? softness overtakes new parts of my body. in every picture, a dimmer green than the green i wanted.

I stop at the gas station just outside of town— the one next to the Skyhaven Motel— to take a picture of the clouds and think: surely, by now, this man has realized that I’m not smart enough for him. But I wonder if that’s really a deal-breaker. A woman in a white truck watches me struggle with the pump. Wind wraps my hair around my mouth. You should see me at the grocery store, you’d really fall in love with me then— turning each avocado as I squeeze it, gently setting it back down. I wish I knew what I wanted.

There’s a dog lying on the side of I-470 for three days then on the fourth day it’s gone. I’m late for work. Everyone else’s car is bigger than my car. I search for a scenario that makes sense— for instance, a dog raised by deer: drinking from Longview Lake, overcoming its lack of hooves, careening toward its natural fate with one final leap across the freeway. It’s easier than imagining a grown man weeping with a dead pit bull in his arms. Anything is easier than a grown man weeping.

a fall look

still, more often than not i wake up feeling sick to my stomach i keep dreaming about your new girlfriend who isn't even new anymore sometimes you're there, sometimes not usually i am trying, somehow, to apologize and sometimes i still think about how i instagrammed that picture of checkermallow bright pink against the coastline and called it a selfie and you called me narcissistic and the party where i met all your friends and jeremiah yelled this one's a keeper but you were in the other room, you didn't even hear him and today, doing dishes at work i remembered how after it was over you said i just wanted to have fun with you dropping the sanitizer tablet in the hot water, watching it dissolve into blue

Today while you work I wander the neighborhood, restless. I see wild paintbrush in a planter box. It doesn’t belong here—bright crimson, rugged flame, trapped beside the porch. I wanted to belong here, didn’t I? This city that I chose. All its bridges. This city where I make coffee and you sell shoes. This city with its questions I can’t answer, my unfinished degree, notebooks lying blank on the floor, your phone buzzing with emails, my friends with their many sadnesses. I only want to belong where light through the tall pines dapples your face, and the red petals are buffeted by wind.

All day I’ve avoided the balsamroot with its stubborn, prickly stem, but you climb out along the ridge, insistent, looking for the perfect one. From the path I watch you move away from me, glowing against the folding hills. The sureness of your body. You can do things I cannot. You can wrench the golden flower from its bush. You can return to me with an entire sun in your fist.

Your car breaks down a mile from the lake. The old couple at the campground lends us their phone, a picnic table, some stories. While you call a tow truck, Karen points to something tangled in the tall grass: tiny pale blossoms veined with purple, five petals arching lushly back from the stamen. Wild geranium, she tells me. And of her husband: He always picks me flowers. For the first three years my vase was never empty. Her palms like leather, her face aglow. Later, driving away from the dealership, your hand on the steering wheel makes my chest ache.

You wake early for work and I keep pretending to sleep, quietly rearranging my hair, my arms while you brush your teeth. By afternoon I am still warm and dizzy from you. In the woods: rain, off and on, crimson columbine with its sharp yellow heart. Speckling the green like lightning bugs, blood, paprika. I don’t know how I got this lonely. Did you know that? I’m lonely all the time.

Toward the summit we find wild iris. Last week, news from Santa Barbara: the young gunman, the sorority girls on the lawn. In a dark bar I told you about it, tried to tell you what it is to walk down the street as a woman, about boys at parties, hands in the dark, the man following me for blocks, his jagged breathing, and you rubbed my back, silent like this had nothing to do with you. I can’t believe the intricacy: snowy faces, yellow veins, purple unfolding between the rocks. When I bend down to touch the petals, you keep walking.

The path winds through alders, climbs above a waterfall, opens suddenly to uncovered rock beds, strangely prehistoric. Back in the shade: upland larkspur already growing limp. Spring is browning at the edges. In bed you trace circles around my nipple with your fingernail. I watch you watch me bite my lip in the afternoon light, already forgetting the indigo blossoms. Forgetting to mourn them. When I pull you into me it is a different kind of grief. I never know when this might end.

see you later