Silicification

photo provided by the author

I.

My name rhymes with yours, so I cut off two syllables. We’re no twinning lesbian couple. I can’t look directly at you. Yes, you’re short. But that’s not it.

I love you day to day, Leana. I widen the gap in me for you. You want to be a mother. I kiss your stomach like the forehead of a child.

I listen to all the sad gay songs on city walks. Everyone is going to a funeral or dreading December or tying a belt around their neck. You promise to teach me the drums. I hold you while your phone plays “In Your Eyes.” You tap the beat on my thigh and try to see if your nose fits in my ear.

You roll a pair of your socks onto my cold feet. And bring the blanket from the couch.

II.

The government sends you to a desert on the West Coast, then one in the Middle East. Whatever undisclosed things they have you do put scotch and sleeping pills on the nightstand.

I pack light. Dildos must remain in the closet. You brief the embassy about who I am to you. Nothing suspicious makes it through customs, and here I am with no cover.

You drive me to the Red Sea. You know I want to swim in all the water in the world. You plan more trips, braid my hair in hotels. We float on the Dead Sea.

I buy us cake to eat in bed. You remove all our clothes to feed me crumbs because we can only hug at the airport. I taste pistachio the whole trip back to the empty couch in DC. 

You get drunk with a married woman who wants to fuck you. You cry and cry on the phone, and I can’t hold you. You change your mind about me. 

Between the balcony’s rotted plants, I watch a black SUV drop you off. You smell different, like the hidden side of tinted windows. You kiss me and don’t notice I don’t want it.

III.

In the Valley of Fire sat a petrified log. Beside it, a plaque: 

Millions of years ago, this tree likely grew with others of its kind in a forest several miles from here. Later, flood waters carried the fallen log to this area where it was buried beneath thousands of feet of silt, sand, and sea deposits. Here it slowly changed.

The log looked like a log behind a fence. No one had polished it to reveal opalized anything. There were folds of silence. There were no pickup trucks or camels or women.

If we stuck around any longer, you’d have turned to stone. And I wouldn’t have left.