That
night, with mittens to keep us warm, we searched the skies for snowflakes
We
stained blackberries with our fingertips, dipped in jam
and the
purple tinge of our skin took days to fade to indigo;
with
heliotrope heads I held her hand and had to remind her to breathe
while we
paraded along the wobbly wails lining the Golden Gate Bridge,
at two
she said she was thirsty, taking in the San Francisco Bay for a drink.
she spoke
with her eyes, her lashes laced with snowflakes
and
didn’t respond, left me in suspense like the Golden Gate Bridge.
She
talked in verse, in double tones harmonized like toast slipping under jam
and we
buzzed in unison , I took a moment to breathe
when I
noticed her turquoise eyes had darkened to a liquid indigo.
The empty
pavement reflected the midnight-mourning indigo.
Around
three we stopped here to drink
and I
drank like a kingfisher, under water where I learned to breathe.
The
moment I shut my eyes, the stars shattered into millions of snowflakes
which
dropped in clumps to the earth, falling together in a jam,
bouncing
off the rubber cars trudging along the Golden Gate Bridge
and
turning to slush as they hit the cement, the radiating heat of the Golden Gate
Bridge
so hot
that flames shot out beneath it, flashing Red White and Indigo.
Drivers
stop to watch the disorienting flickers, sparking an endless traffic jam
and for
hours I banged on the windows of their cars, in desperate search of a drink,
and each
glare she pointed at me in the process was one-of-a-kind, each one a snowflake
strangling
my vocal chords, holding so tightly I could scarcely breathe.
Guiltily,
I thought, If only she could breathe,
as her
lungs stood rigid, the wind-withstanding columns of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Clinging
to her like tarred feathers, glimmering snowflakes
dyed
apricot and crimson, melt into her indigo.
She
dripped a little of her intoxication into my drink
and she
spread over my palms in a viscous smear, strawberry jam.
And now,
the thick, sticky red residue stains everything as I jam
all
traces of her in a cardboard moving box labelled ‘breathe.’
I wipe
away the imprints, fingers and lips, from the glass from which she last took a
drink
and the
photographs of suspended auburn wires, crossing her mind like a Golden Gate
Bridge.
I shaved
away thoughts of how I was the bay water flowing beneath them, indigo.
The
memories of her dissolve at my touch, disintegrating snowflakes.
I drink
her, spiritlessly, jamming the brakes in the center of the Golden Gate Bridge
Rinsing
my chest in indigo moonlight, swallowing the snowflakes
with amplified rising and falling, so that everyone can hear me
breathe.
