Travel Shorts

His floating workshop; a place he remembers
times past.
The wind up bird
her mechanical wings
laden with words. She'll knock you
for six
she'll blow you away.
Quietly squeal queer bird,
her mechanical wings
clipped
and words pirouette
like feathers
or hard rain.
Chained to a tether she only
makes whirring circles
and bounces like
the sound
of a moth inside
a lampshade.
His bird was flown some
time ago.
Left behind no
scattered seeds.

Hiding in shaded gardens where
she tends
to her rich fantasies
and in grand houses
where she hides things under carpets
and worries about dust.

Her dissembled sentences rolling too quickly from the lips,
His arms; the archipelago of oil floating on skin.
Her fingers tacking side to side across his back;
His shoulders tensing, rippling under her touches.
Her consonants crashing against vowels, fricatives spraying
His face with its crags and boulders.

“I can't have children.”

Rowing out to an island,
clinging to a rock.
Words bend truth like
waves bend wood
splinters
into a thousand pieces
each with a story to tell.
A ghost ship,
a kraken.
a thunderstorm,
a night of a thousand fish.
The night she slipped away from him
and his lonely hours by the radio

in the palm of your hand