FORECAST

TERRITORIES

12:00
one rainy night, streaked with riotous lightning,
drowning in a bed enveloped by wave-like shadows,
glancing up from beneath the covers at the bellow
of distant thunder, cracked bucket beside your pillow,
roof leaking secrets, a deluge of misplaced reveries,
specters of snow-covered mountains in the crests of
your cool, cotton sheets, someone will place their palm
against your hipbone and hope to keep you warm.
you will close your eyes and dream of landslides,
even while they bathe you in mists of tenderness.
00:00
your eyes will quiver open, hands damp with guilt
and disquiet, after incubating in the cyclone of your
reckless self-doubt. the display on the clock flashes,
blank, confused, strobing red against the ceiling
like the glimmer of a distant Mars after the sky
has cleared. the forecast will read partly cloudy.
you will turn and sigh, and someone will rest their
ankle over yours, absorbing the caustic heat of
merciful omissions as the hopeful, rusty windowpane
quakes under the downpour, echoing against the
tear-streaked glass, red light blinking on and off.
04:00
the forecast will read partly cloudy, but as the
pale dawn breaches, water will still be falling,
someone will still be holding you. they will
press their forehead against your thunderous heart
and call you their refuge, a cavern in the wilderness,
a safe place, a shelter made of stipulations, a place
to rest uninhibited by the inconveniences of verity.
but you will know the truth. you will know the relative
humidity of pulsing storms, the relentless vigor of
all things erosive, the ephemeral candor of a thunderclap.
you will know what turns umbrellas inside out.
you will know the temperament of water, you will know
because you are the storm.

Weve sailed deep into the entropy of undulating singularities,

apogee, moth burned by a candle in the pallid firmament of
selfish rapture, spiraling, Icarus melted by the sun, looking upwards,
crumbling down and away. Weve split the water like steel harpoons,
stabbing blindly, glancing off of scales both resplendent and unyielding.
Once we were unyielding too.
Love is a lone masthead, lovers are reflections in the moonlit water,
To love someone is to wash up on the beach hundreds of yards
away from them. Love is sand in your eyes and salt in your mouth.
Lovers are baby turtles racing for the shallows. To love someone
is to let them go. To let them go is to love them.
When weve waded through the brackish tide pools and crawled
ashore, we will turn towards each other, compelled, compass
needles pointing north, choices we make in spite of ourselves,
staggering along the coast, shadows stretched out like bridges,
our bodies unarmored, our hands cracked open, spilling glorious
paradoxes, your bones, hungry hourglasses, my blood, a sandstorm.