lips on your warm skin

It’s evening, the light is lunar,

the sky’s long brushed tails

 

draped like silver stoles on the

sagging hills,

metallic sun

burning from a tight-lipped wound

in the clouds.

My eyes squint from the glare.

You are always my winter,

 

turning chilly in rough blue wool,

shivering chapped-lipped by the car,

sun buttering in like a blade behind the eyes.

 

Unweaned, suckling from the teat

of memory,

the spasm of nostalgia,

 

we are still as tethered to time

as we ever were, as I ever was,

 

still haunted by

the vulnerability of others.