Night time, some week in early winter
and her window is illuminated, gauzy through blinds
the corona of her space emanating into the night
You can’t help but put yourself in her bed,
sheets rumpled like used tissues,
her skin still holding its tan all the way to December,
chest and pelvis like splotches of white sand amid a beach of darker hue

And this, suddenly, is how she comes back to you,
in the random order of seismic tremors
Sometimes, she merely rattles your foundation,
but others, she decimates your whole construct from the map
leaves you naked and scarred, standing in a pile of rubble
flabbergasted as to where the fuck your life just collapsed to

Though from this distance, the grief is a condensed version
of its original form, ephemeral even at its most devastating
and just as suddenly as it came, it passes as you take a step,
the night road ahead emerging from the calamity
paved and neatly lined, structurally sound for passage