We discussed the merits of positive phototaxis the way a life, without thinking, bends toward the light source. My name is a genus I can’t quite place, something that blooms only at dusk. I have tried to classify the architecture of its silence: the brittle leaf of a note left on the counter, the shed chrysalis of a promise on the floor. You move through the house as if letting the world pass through you, an earthworm’s blind contentment. I am left to study the evidence: a fingerprint on a glass, the pale dust of moth wing on the sill. At night, I dream of the sea, of the soapfish that froths when threatened, of the way a body can make its own defense out of what is softest in itself. I wake up tasting salt, which is the mineral of sorrow, and you are still sleeping, your back to me, a coastline I stand contemplating, one day again, eclipsing all land.
standalone poem