Yesterday, you pulled off the road and took me to the river where you first told a girl you loved her. Watching the reeds bend against the sunset, I think it’s my turn to be a man and confess something. I can come clean here. Everything is to be reckoned. With you. With me. This little family. This thing we call love. This survival. This sobriety.
Your lips are dry and brown with blood. I could kiss you forever and soak your lips in my wet mouth. Restraining. I want to love you violently and gently again and again till we’re both sufficiently sore with forever.
Watching you move your disproportional child like body held together by your massive back, it’s so beautiful. Big enough for me to sleep on like a mattress. We kiss in the tall grass flattening it into a canvas. You want to kiss till the coyotes circle us. You want to shoot them down and give me more reasons to love you.
You are never not watching me. I walk to the edge of the riverbed where the dirt is corroded into something soft and I close my eyes and imagine your gaze punching the pieces of sand into diamonds. You take my picture on your phone and it looks like I’ve entered heaven in hues of gold. Me and the dog look like two tall rocks. The land is so flat it’s so beautiful. When I turn around, I can see you standing far away with your face behind your phone. You’re taking a video of me and my hair catches the light and I can hear your chest tighten. This was always your choice. I’m constantly in tears about it.
We can’t survive the real world where there’s real water. It moves. That is a selfish place. We are made for dry heat and only the saturation between us. You tell me that the entire river has been dissolved for years and that we are where absence left structure. We are living proof that something moved through the earth and did not take us with it. We are lucky dirt.
You’ve never been anywhere you didn’t want to be. That’s why you want to walk slowly because every step is a decision. You could walk into heaven right now if you didn’t want to be here pressing my hands and legs into the dirt, making me golden too. We are solely this moment and it will last forever. We could retire language in heaven and live eternally silent. I think we’re forever here, open and in the wind. You are forever gazing and I am forever yours.
Ginger Jones is a poet from California.