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.