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.

 

When the edges curl.

In the pool,

where I brown my skin to pretend

the smoothness will last when the color fades,

the kids splash, but their mothers say,

“Don’t get too close to the lady with the book,

you’ll get her pages wet.”

I say nothing.

But I like it when the edges curl up like they are alive,

I imagine this sentence, “It might seem like you’re limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky,”

dropping into the water,

Krauss’s words spreading wider until the gaps between the letters

become void when the ink runs together.

The boy says,

“Mom, did you know that sometimes scientists lie?  The earth is actually a big spaceship with a bunch of people in it.”

She looked back at him,

and we sat there saying nothing together.

When I was a swan in the ballet, a hunter took me by the hand, and I followed him

not knowing where he was taking me put a knot in my stomach that I wanted to feel.

He stopped and did nothing.  He wasn’t taking me anywhere, but he looked at me as though I could make things that weren’t possible happen

or I looked at me that way.

I use to say nothing and everything all at once.