the destroyer > text > Dan Pinkerton

HOLIDAY, POST-ECLIPSE

Begoggled, agog, we viewed the eclipse.

Thereafter we chose to engage primarily in seasonal relations.

Summer would become a policing of flesh, a bodily quarantine.

In wintertime we would wear cowls and assume a vast muteness.

This worked for awhile, until the spendthrift islands.

You chose to skin dive, something uncharacteristic, a fledgling rupture.

Your two-piece made you venus flytrapesque.

Still, you viewed near-nudity as something vestigial.

I knew the eclipse had fried your wiring.

Under an awning I bought a seashell from among a plentitude of seashells.

A boy on a minibike snatched the seashell, holding it loftily, lathered in exhaust.

The seashell was his trophy.

Mine was a literal nameplated trophy, lost in transit.

Yours was the eclipse, or the skin diving, or the thought that no man is a trophy.

You of course were away by then, your carnivorous leaves peppered with suitors.