Rain pours outside the kitchen window.
Across the highway palm trees bow humble.
Two bushes trapped on the divide
cling to top soil, eroding.
Winter’s arrived.
Scribble, scrabble, sniffle, tattle.
Ceramic coffee mugs click into grooved
ceramic saucers like
noise of a shutter
that will later produce a picture
for blackmail.
Scribble, scrabble, sniffle, tattle.
Guilt seethes through pores;
it’s the sweat from a walk on which one was lost
on the longest night of the year
in the darkest place on the planet,
farthest from human,
animal,
plant,
shelter,
star,
or god.
Scribble, scrabble, sniffle, tattle.
Collapse from exhaustion, from fear.
Collapse from the continuous beating
of a single drip of water
repeating, repeating, repeating,
year after year.
Scribble scrabble, sniffle, tattle.
Pages of my calendar scatter to the floor
like a lover falling back against a pillow:
It was nice, let’s do it again.
November, December—I always will remember,
January, February—your touch against my skin.
Scribble, scrabble, sniffle, tattle.
Of course nothing changes (and nothing ever will).
Even I am the same seven-year-old girl
hiding eggs behind the garden shed
in fear of the wrath that will come
for my swearing forty-minutes before,
in the dairy section of the grocery store,
that at home there was none.
Scribble, scrabble, sniffle, tattle.