the things we are not

I think we are made of the things we are not. Cut out from the cloth that is lost. A voice shouting over the top of the car. It’s over. It folds into me like an echo. The feeling that I will never wring that moment out of myself, watching you shrink. you say we are the ones who stay. a thread pulled tight that never breaks.

Tonight I’d like to believe in something soft and I’d like the things that are to be enough. I am drying and draping these things on a line in the sun and seashells become pale on the wall.

There is a page torn loose, half-lost.

memory bone

fading fast

before.
in the dunes
collecting pieces of nothing in a pail.
Everything humming.
A kind of quiet that presses against the chest—
like something holy just left,
and no one saw it go