Darling,

In another letter, a lover goes out of existence, writing herself into snow. Her beloved’s eyes burn like a patch of sun. In another, a lover confesses flaws he thinks he has concealed. Color-blindness. A fetish for bodies in shadow. An aversion to velvet. Elsewhere another lover writes of haddock and chowder. She shares the name of the backroads restaurant she discovered on a local’s tip. She offers it to her darling like a lion’s head. In another letter, another lover begs forgiveness, enclosing a portrait of the Duke of Urbino and his famous red codpiece. In the painting, the Duke wears black armor. His eyes are wounded, and the mastiff, close at his thigh, knows to love him carefully. Other letters, other lovers ask questions. Why the furthest clouds are closest to the heart. How long it takes for one body to recalibrate another. Why only these five senses. What happens when a heart is pulled up by the root. Where it is, exactly, we are. In another letter, you write to me. It is dressed in an envelope so thin, I can see the blue ink scrawled across the page within.

When she found day slow as glass, she snipped an oblong strip. And from the fish smoke of her skillet, the artist spun stars. Golden strings she harvested from her aunt’s piano. She took in the sullen slicks she found by the wharf, bottle-feeding the little stains champagne. Some even submitted to her brush. Once, from a dead cherry tree, she coaxed a flap of shadow from its roost. She took it home to her studio. Nights, they curled up and scratched each other with nails light as lips. It was from the shadow that she learned what it was to live inside color, working like a gill. And where in the present to build closets of the past. How to keep her dizziness in check as she followed the shadow through the lens of noon. Why was it then, when the time came for the shadow finally to lift, she felt light? In what may have been the last lesson, she watched, petal by petal, as it gave itself away.