Clean

On the roof, it is just her under the cold water sky. Her with the confused laundry and just two hands. She holds the sheet on the line and thinks this is the waiting, the blood-pulse-bottom-lip waiting. The sheets, the wooden pegs, her cold hands. She buries her face in the white-wide sheet and smells the clean.

She can smell him from here, how he smells in the morning, caramel and beastly. Downstairs he sleeps blind and tangerine, his sleepy alone. Wrestle and nuzzle. She left the window open wide so he would wake up and remember to want her.

She tugs the dancing sheets from the line, bundling them into one arm, lifeless now. Wooden pins between her teeth taste like drift wood and salt. She spits them into the bucket at her feet. She might stay up here all day.

Two Feet Left

The world seen from two feet left. What she can see from here. On the roof. With the laundry, the salt thrown birds. Confused again. She bends her neck, exposes nape to cold water sky. School children run home with seagull cries. She sees past the rust rooftops.

In the alley, a dog wanders. Scrawny. Sits. Pants in the puddles and torn bits of sky. Clouds pass sleepless.

Down by the dock, two boys. One touches the railroad tracks. “Stand closer if you want time to stop,” he tells the other boy. Will he? Seven stories up she wonders how one thing leads to another. Whether she made all of this up. Well, all but the part about the dog. And the confused laundry. It’s still there. Will always be there.

The boys are gone. Just her now. And his words scattered across the rooftops. How he asked, at the hotel room door, “What's the good in something that can't happen again?” No, we are the shortest way down, she thinks. How it must be.