We meet in the ecotone, the western beach where my body is white sugar,

black stony sand, ground from greedy, chromatic altruism.

Our thoughts in the ocean, in sweetness or salt that unclasps and deters your tongue,

I brace my bottom lip on my palm to weather the Everest em-dash –

the pauses between sips, between breath, between the words that aren’t a yes.

A southbound city bus takes a paper coffee cup to the flank,

a spray of lukewarm latte as I pass, the now-frozen penalty

for blocking your name on the jazz club’s marquee across the street.

If you invited me by, I’d side-slip onto that Steinway bench like a saddle,

study the slick fallboard’s reflection of your fleet fingers on the keys

playing the chords whose names I can’t remember.

Last December, on the dimly-lit balcony, I observed like a scholar –

sated with candied jealousy over a set of expensive spruce polymer rectangles

and felted hammers from back east– your hands discovering something they not merely desire again and again, but know like the rain in your mouth or the skirt of the sea –

offering them the kind of touch no woman will ever know from you.

Let’s say you’re in art school again, as I stand alabaster bare in the mirror,

save for a ribbon of rosy, eastern light through the window by the Linden tree.

Your sun-drunk knuckles primly outline my frame in the trembling glass,

forsaking the wildest peace you could know in the spaces between my ribs

and the gossamer landscape of my small breasts. That will be enough between friends.

But if they say I will die, take my picture laughing,

just after we’ve spent ourselves against the cool tile wall of the shower,

already late because I dared you to write out your top six bars from Episode 5.

Full score.

From memory.

In chalk, on the sidewalk for the neighbors. I’ll lean

on your shoulder when we can’t sleep, while you play the Great American songbook. I’ll trace,

with my salt-laden lashes, the boyish glint of mischief on your unshaven face,

that one perfect wave in your hair. And when it’s over, carry me.

Lay me lithe and loved into the alkaline, under the pale purple eye of dawn.

And when I’m sugar and sand once more, mix me

with the fierce, red dirt of Mars and tell someone new I was brave.

Valerie studied creative writing and music at Pennsylvania State University. Her work has been seen in Sheila-Na-Gig, The Write Launch, River Heron Review, Kalliope, Willard and Maple, Aurore, Cathexis Northwest Press, Ember Chasm Review, Saint Paul Almanac, Duck Lake Journal, and on Minnesota Public Radio and the literary podcast, Apertures. Professionally, she is a violist and orchestra librarian with the Minnesota Orchestra.