Though I had wiped her from my mind.

Sacrificed a thousand sunny days for one unbroken chain of gloom to loom over me like the mist to the sea.

When I see her face in the autumn sky,

I relive vague dreams of summer,

Wiggling my toes in the sand & sweaty, intertwined hands that drip with doe-eyed innocence.

My first love, born with the scorpion’s venom,

Put his stinger in my heart, convulsing on shore as fish do when they cannot quench their thirst

And my rosary of pearls dangled around my neck,

Petals strewn across the aisle to my deflowering

Where a stone virgin waits for me to vow chastity to her.

We were stupid kids

Arrogant enough to believe we were better than falling into cages with cliches.

He escaped low tides by climbing the steeple

And rang the church bells a sound of warning

For the tsnunami blasts my existence to smithereens.

I lie alongside the ghosts of Atlantis,

Frolicking in waterlogged orange groves—

Her California smile, evaporated in smoke as an offering at the altar of a temple God has not set foot in

In a century.