Good folklore begins with shared breath, a half-true story. & maybe kids, to water the lyric with fresh eyes. In colder places they still think we knotted the red bandanas over our eyes, unable to trust in other colors. A half-truth. True Texans are serial lovers of their birthrights and muscles. I have no birthright nor muscle. I was born in the crepuscular north of Texas & do not plan to die alone, so close to my creation and hometown church. My ark of a mouth has never gone bone-dry a day in my life yet it plans to, soon. Untrue Texans do not hate opening our arms. It is too easy to know a different god here & have the suburbs empty out, just for you and every ancestor. Sometimes, it is too easy to let skin be skin outside a gas station, under excuse of night. Yet in the countryside, there would be no animals on the road, no more purple fists, just the quickness of blood warming metal & your ashes reminding someone that really, they do want to live.

May comes by, spreads her supple branches out and yawns. I tell you I’m in love again and you ask Why? The truth comes out asymmetric. By their end, poets write the closest they can to prose. Plot: plot. Us: us. We love our jukebox of a city in quarters, moon-silver and slim. Three years in, and we’re still afraid of the checkered cafés. Three years ago, I dragged you by the wrist into a yard of skyscrapers. You’re sick again, and I slot the wooden spoon into your mouth like it’s a skeleton key, tofu a pearl on its edge. Our green couch groans with superstitions. You never ask for anything twice. You don’t like the boys I date. You don’t know where you caught this from, what it is, only that it could’ve been from anyone but me. Once again I stir behind you, pretending not to measure the silence, so lithe, between us.