Downdraft
There’s really no difference between a tongue in someone else’s mouth and a tongue in your own. I can watch another version of myself pouring you back into the decanter. When you left, the bed turned into a giant lung beside a window. I pulled my legs up into it. Those days we all needed something. My feet flung out the passenger window, soles black from walking the quarry. I insisted you carry me across the tracks even though it was years since the last engine rolled through town. We’d even tied my toaster to the rails to prove it. Where did you go with your Indiana- accent hasta maña, handful of Saltines and mayo, secret love of televised golf? The way your hands shook even when you weren’t nervous. I can’t pinpoint exactly when it started, who made the first move, whether we were in line at the bank, on a bus downtown, or just ended up naked and didn’t question it, set our clocks back two hours. Hot gravel whirled to the sky on the night you drove away, and I took the yard boys down to my crawl space. A tornado raged out to Garrettsville. Nobody noticed the shattered marquee lights, one white bass blown out of the pond, flapping on the hood of a tractor. Your baseball cap nestled in between the concrete frog and rain-soaked telephone book. There was one bird left for every tree.