Lessons From the Kissing Booth

It waits for me in pictures, a faint strain of a song half remembered, a touch of fabric under sorry fingers. A memory that settles like dust on a wallowing sparrow.

I should speak to you with my lips pressed to the underside of your chin, so that whatever I have to say might pass through your tongue to rattle in your head. After a day sitting quietly in the rain my fingers feel as though they're rusting, smelling of old magazines and creaking like a rocking chair. I'm storing up the quiet in my bones so that come springtime there will be a solid place from which to sprout flowers.