"Fire Escape"

Photo by Mary K. Baird Shoulder to window to back in psychic union, I’m eyeing the roiled bed and aftershock bookshelves, you’re mapping the topographies of balconies and lives behind shutters. I imagine the glass as your rigid spine, a grand piano of bones and the melodies it’ll yield. Nightly smoke break. You’re cross-legged and shamanistic on the metal slats of a peeling ladder, exhaling telegrams on the wind. Sticky breath and broiled lips too remote to taste, I hate your momentary obliviousness to blackened lungs and me. Pivot away, I’ll paint your face with twelve expressions, a mouth imperceptibly coiling in private joy, eyes harboring silvery flares, skin star-frosted like a mirrored pool, before you can climb through the dusky rictus, with a downward glare and a secondhand kiss.