Dear city of steadfast jigsaws, 
dear summered in rope-swing

Your face is a room emptied
of its ghosts and their pillow talk

There is morning outside your 
eyelids—the humble appetite of 

sparrows and alley cats. Pigeons 
studying their own fluttering echoes

in the blinking pools cupped inside 
broken ceramic. The birds have taken 

to guarding the city-voids, those 
long roads etherized by improbable

shadows. These are days of growing
coriander in egg-trays. Of learning

how to harvest scarcity in the shape
of buckled peppers. A cup of milk

curdling into a ragged cloud. Pixel
-ated dinners shared over skype calls.

These forbidding tutorials of lack
where longing should have ripened 

Dear silver-snail slowness, dear lemon
-bright afternoons of wordless cassia—

How do we untether, uncusp, to fit the
fall that floats between home and haunt?