I am soft like sex when it’s raining outside. My musical blood plays Lacrymosa while my feet climb toward success without me. The ivy strangles the wall, and everyone driving by talks about how beautiful the wall with the ivy is, as though tendril and stone were lovers. As though a kind of abuse isn’t happening in front of us. I am soft like the fertile hillocks of Kansas. The disaster of vine and structural integrity. Gravity is a cheap hooker and a terrible pessimist, always bringing everyone down. I am soft like a memory of pajamas with feet in them. I could never pretend to be a stone wall, but still I am tenderly hunted by the tendrils, their iron wills coiled and ready to strike.

Cool sonnets soak the sweat off my cracking skin. Here in the desert, ghosts made of love hover everywhere. The cacti are ringed in bubblegum pink halos. The love of a woman is a desert dweller. If you water it a little bit once a century, it will cling on, carving your name on grains of sand. Just the tiniest drop will keep it alive. He met me in the onyx city shellacked with heat. My dance card was full, and then he tattooed his name on my silky spirit and wiped my mismanaged hours away. Somewhere, my old self dances and dances because if she stops, she will die. But here in the parched peace of premium paradise, I can rest my weary bones with the ghosts and count my pinkest wounds.