I.

Let me state this as simply as possible:

There was a girl whose hands cupped to her hips when she walked
like they were holding liquid secrets.

What was interesting to me weren’t so much the things she said
but the way she said them,
pushing promises through purple stained lips

and tucking them in,
breathing hazy hued volition into crevasses I didn’t know were there
or had forgotten about.

But what I haven’t forgotten about is how,
in the dim light of motel room lamps,
what was interesting to her were the calluses on my hands.

Where do they come from, she would ask.
Work, I tell her.

And all this girl will ever know of work
will be the rough hills of skin on my hands
or someone else’s.
And what was left wasn’t enough for my mother to stop sorting second hand clothing
or to banish the allure of out of state plates,

so this girl will say
kiss me here and here and here.
And I will.

But I won’t know where to go next
and because I’m not quite sure how to talk about love,
let me state this as simply as possible:

There was a girl who hushed things into my skull.
My ears won’t stop ringing.

But that was when we would sit on swing sets and drink green sodas.
Static clouds of gnats hung over anything wet: it was summer.

II.

That summer someone I didn’t know
got diagnosed with something I couldn’t pronounce
and my father got dark beneath the eyes and forgot how syllables worked.
He would drag his knuckles across anything rough and called all strangers Gerrys.

I roofed houses with work-release cons
And blow addicts who’d eightball out of the
L-crevasse between their thumb and index finger
And then tell stories about when they had all their teeth.
Then I’d wait tables at a small Mexican restaurant
where they’d let me drink for free and glow off
my sunburn hitting on women much older and much
drunker than I was.

I’d read to my dad when I got home,
Conrad and O’Connor,
as the sun was coming up,
and although he had all his teeth
and hadn’t been to jail for decades,
he’d share stories infinitely better than
what I heard on the rooftops.

When I sold my Buick and moved
east, I forgot about the girl and the cons
and the Mexican restaurant, but the calluses
were there. I met a man named Flaco
at a truck stop who told me I had an old school
handshake and asked me for change
to buy a Black and Mild that,
for a reason I’ve never figured out,
he gave back to me.