by Leah Kaminski
1.
The streetlights glide in smooth flocks,
stillwinged in the center of this greasebuilt street.
Last night before you launched drunk
and selfserious onto the motel walkway’s
innocent bush, we left the hall
and the seagulls glowed
like paper on white fire-
muscled beveled column, fine dive
straight through air
-they glowed streaming
across the near horizon,
away from, in fearstruck tandem with,
the fireworks across Narragansett Bay.
Behind a scrim of bowtie
and crinoline your rictus smile
freed to bloom, unpocked
by doubt your skin
smooth and shining, solid,
skimming our skeleton-
lace, concrete, shocking marrow
in the streetlight’s xray kiss.
2.
It was a late summer, hitched
swollen-ankled through rain
and near-cold;
it’s an early fall. Fog squints at graffitied brick, settles,
and Fort Point Channel
is the murky gray of deep ice.
You sleeping under a fathom
of whiskey, unreachable,
you taking me to a dark-muscled,
scrubbed-sere, a place where still, I claim,
beauty, or why else;
where facing the darkgray water of our small imaginings, we sit bleary
with a bike, a purse, with the birds and cigarettes,
with the gasses state-changing and stoking and damping;
always almost-graspable.
*Photo courtesy of nogwater.