--I WAS IN THE RIGHT PLACE, BUT IT MUST HAVE BEEN THE WRONG TIME

                                             That One

         She drew me a sad smile with the tips of her toes and said, “Love is like a craft beer.  It’s inevitable.”

The penguins were riled up, bobbing around the toaster, but the puma looked sleepy, or bored to tears.

Back then we older and less porous, so we used math to sharpen our weapons.  Cadavers became bookmarks.  Ghost shadows as paperweights.  A stitch in time for a headrest.

Someone--her dead father or the landlord that liked to evict--wrote her a letter in invisible ink.  The sentences hid in sticky silence until the eclipse.

It came to be that we ran out of her favorite jam.  We were out of time as well, but so was everyone else.

When the alarm chirped a ripe number, she put on Sinatra and took off all her strings.  Around the room, she swayed like a pliant hologram.  Every wall and appliance applauded. 

That one, she had a way with the future.  It was the past she could never quite scrape off her shoe.