The milk-white water has tomorrow off. It wants a motorcycle, to be remedied of its anxieties. These are not obscure days in the book’s pages. The page earmarking a motion that annoys all of its coworkers. Will it with the better words left off of your stone.

Sayer of thin crutches. Drag footlegged along the beech – its paper-bark style. The fire in the mountain is just another volcano playing a game with others.

When I came to know the salt of your skin it was not the right season. We’d built our lean-to on the dirt. It was easy to let the air in, to get the go-light to drop down the intersection. I mistrusted a horse and you played the field.

A horn hooked into this hovering divide, lines draped with wet cloth, the crying sheets gone evenly dry. The bed itself looked to us for our enviable youth, let the match tickle its ends. As it flicked, the crowds filled up the lobby and filed out into the used furniture. They fanned a light-flashing crew of men with long hoses.

You know what they say. The water has no memory of wow, whosoever slept in the crook of this sport was cast as a fleet and limber corpse. Rings around the eyes, the tree saw singing with hair bowed up across its blade.

A sound ghost in our cabinetry telling us we were made too late to up and leave the smoke all around us as it hung.

____Tony Mancus is the author of four chapbooks - most recently Bye Sea from Tree Light Books and Again(st) Membering, out from Horse Less Press in fall of '14. He is co-founder of Flying Guillotine Press and currently works as a technical writer. He and his wife Shannon live in Arlington, VA with their two yappy cats.