(the one you won’t like)
I. Knees
We should go.
Somewhere the stars remember how to touch the water.
Galveston, maybe
where the gas stations still open your bottles for you
and sell limes in baskets by the door.
Let’s take a room that reeks of brine and freon,
sand tracked into the bedspread from other lovers,
and leave the door open to the sea.
We should fuck like we’re trying to forget
which one of us came here broken
like the answer’s somewhere
in salt on skin,
in the backs of knees,
in the way your mouth unlearns its name
each time you say mine.
Ten hours.
Till the tide forgets its schedule
and the stars drip down the windshield
like motel neon in reverse.
Your hands will smell like lime and sweat.
The sheets will stick.
We’ll watch the mirror watch our wanting.
We’ll sleep in the curl of each other’s wreckage,
and when the morning comes
we’ll walk barefoot
to the edge of whatever we almost outran.
II. Blue Hour
Yeah, we should go to Galveston.
We should but we didn’t and we won’t.
I don’t even remember your voice.
If we’d gone when I had nothing,
the Mexicans at the gas station might have said:
“Podría ser peor. ¿Mejor? Quién sabe.”
They’d have looked at the tires,
the way you didn’t get out of the car,
smelled the heat between us.
I’d hand you the gun you didn’t know about,
say I’d be right back.
I’d buy a candy bar,
get you a bottle of water;
other things we wouldn’t use.
We’d have gotten there at the blue hour,
when everything looks like it might still happen.
The sea would’ve been quiet.
But we didn’t.
And now Galveston is just a place
in every one of these places I go.
You’re smart. I’m dumb.
I get it. I’ve gotta go.
III. Shotguns
But what if we went? What then?
What the hell if we had gone?
What if it had all worked out?
Could we have held all that together?
It would have had to get boring.
I wanted boring. I think you did too.
Get off the carousel. Get out of the motel.
Could we have done that?
I can’t imagine you at the Whole Foods,
standing in line with a buggy full of lunch meat,
with sports drinks draped over the side.
The best thing I learned from you
is how to eat a frozen pizza. We were great then.
But I don’t know. Could we have done that?
Not for a garden party, or a photo online.
For more than ten hours.
We’re gone. Fuck it—we are gone. We are gone.
And I am still thinking about Whole Foods,
and frozen pizzas, and the rattling air conditioner,
and your toothbrush in the soap dish.
I think you could do it.
Galveston.
Go away.
I feel you.
IV. ()
No
-- C. Sandbatch is an American writer.
header image by author / original photo by Marianne.