When my palms face the sun.

In the pool,

where I pretend the chlorine will

bleach my mistakes without turning my hair green,

the men turn skin into leather.

A man who preferred F bombs over cannon balls said,

“We’ve got to stop meeting this way.  Thought about you the other day when I picked up

some Heineken,”

but the man with hair longer than his patience said something by

not saying anything at all.

This time, when the mother insisted,

“Stay away from the lady with the book,

you’ll get her pages wet,”

I said, “It’s okay, the pages dry,”

and she smiled.

I never use a bookmark, because I always know where I left off.

In the Age of Silence,

people communicated only with their hands,

where I wouldn’t get into as much trouble with ambiguity.

Krauss’s words,”the lover might accidentally take to be the gesture, not at all dissimilar, for Now I realize I was wrong to love you.  These mistakes were heartbreaking.  And yet, because people knew how easily they could happen, because they didn’t go around with the illusion that they understood perfectly the things other people said, they were used to interrupting each other to ask if they’d understood correctly,”

landed softly in my cushioned palms because they were

always facing the sun.

I mixed the black print in with the spaces in between into the water around me because intention is overlooked in a world

without greys.

There was a time when the only thing that happened when my shoulder strap broke was that it made it easier to crawl out.