& you have glass ribcage without bars. The ones beside you have steel shadows and you have wilderness breath. I drip paintings off my tongue and you ask me why so many stamps must be licked across your envelope to me.
& you wonder where you must wander in order to float your sins away. Waterproof your shadow with bacitracin and backbones. Talk to the turtles wearing only linen on your teeth because they snap. Feed them chords off your acoustic eloquence.
& you understand the linguistics of starvation. Shadows have no appetite when you interrogate their swallow. You stood beside me in shower stall as I ripped out years from my hair in order to find my way out from the muddle.
& you enlisted my neck as a floatation device. That shadow no longer smokes, rather exhales lungs against wind chimes and oil spills. Does it matter that home exists in the trees for six months and then when the roots split, the fire inhales you back.
& you donated seven tablespoons of your family tree to the ones who have nowhere to claim at night. At a time called evening, a shadow knocks its pause into your forehead and drenches your sight with noble fumes. You trouble the planets with each question mark dug into its soiled skin and when you qualify your burns as flirtations with the sun, everyone around presses your agony away.
Aimee Herman 