Pumpkin Foam

It was a hollow red, and it smelled like burning, and it crusted over leaf-tips on stems in pots.

             If they were real, and not plastic, they might have tasted sour.

Your room always reminded me of religious iconography—

It drew in the sun’s yellows, the brick’s erubescence, the blues of the concrete outside.

The days melted together like chocolate the second your head hit my chest and the TV turned on,

The Space Prince’s haloed figure a wordless chimera laying witness to the prayers you offered me;

I was your paradise, but only by convenience, only by nightfall, and only in front of the lemon hard candy on

Your nightstand. Each time I opened my mouth, your smile would caramelize a little more, and

I’d find myself a little smaller.

Sometimes you forget how clouds taste when the earth and sky fall asleep in cars and hospital rooms

Instead of coming back home. So I curled up on our dirty brown couch, watching the Animaniacs

Piss the security guard off. I love it when they work together to get his attention–even if it’s negative.

I know why.

They only have each other in that empty water tower.

Thank you, said my host-dad—For what? Eating your food?

The harbor wave struck Minamisanriku in 2011; deep, cerulean waves crawled over four-story walls

Towards the office where his son worked.

For listening.

See if you can piece together the correct order:

A substitute teacher shook me by the neck in the second grade. I refused to shut up, more times than they could

Handle. It’s not my fault–I’d rather die than stop telling Veronica about my cousin’s famous rock band.

Even if I made it all up. Maybe I deserved it. Would anyone have believed me?

Finally, my vision blacked out, and I became the fourth warner brother–doomed to chase and be chased,

Until I get caught and locked in the see-through water tower. Behind the glass, I look a bit like a lemon drop; so I Climb out and skate back to your place, where I ask you—would you still love me if I lived in space, thousands of light-years away? And when you answer with a smile—

I look at myself in the TV’s reflection.

In early June, a little man lies on a little asteroid—

Not his, because there are no claws, no jarred flowers.

Jewels glitter over black velvet, but

His back is cold and arched, and

He’s bleeding, because he listened.