Ceiling melts. Cinnamon sticks leg themselves across the floor. My knees 

remember wet gravel and a flipped bike.

A crow blinks sideways at the Kroger. Its eye tastes like pennies. I smell smoke 

in the gutter. $135 to continue to feel like myself.

Tin cans hold old conversations. I press one to my ear. Nothing replies.

A leaf folds itself into my palm, whispers angles of something I almost know. 

My fingers dissolve

and the sun leaks sideways. Shadows bite bricks. I taste the air: rust, sweet 

hair, forgotten voices;

I chew dust from a pickup, swallow wind from the steeple across the road. The 

broken cry back, everywhere; nowhere.

The girl I was tumbles into origami. She reeks of old syrup and ash. 

The sky bends. Shadows leak. Footsteps vanish. I pick them up, carry them in 

a fistful of cloud.

As the doors breathe, I slide between them. My hair wet, my hands water, my 

tongue cement.

A bell rings inside a puddle. I dip my wrist, and the puddle opens like memory.

I move. The air moves around me. My shadow moves against me. A crow folds 

my hat into a sail. I sail anyway.

I fold myself into the street corner. My ribs hum. The world leans. The girl 

laughs—or coughs. I cannot tell.