Meredith, Are You Still in the Holy City?

By Caroline Davidson

I want to tell you about this dryness, this
unfamiliar overture. Fleets do not land here.

Lakes are locked and no one
will meet me in this basement. It throbs.

Far from the harbor, from dying Line Street;
its bean-pie awnings, its porches that drip

lead paint onto chain-link.
I used to watch for oncoming jasmine.

Sat in heat with hobbled gnats.
Wished I could touch you never told you.

Did our house continue to crumble
after the cop shot the woman next door.

Once I dreamt that your eyelashes got hot enough
to melt confectioner’s sugar. We laughed and took off our heads,

then placed them gently on downed power lines.
Did you say that muggings are only casual,

that they are—what? Evening knife chimes?
I have nothing to say at this vanishing point.

Watch me cut apples. Watch the apron unthread.
Live Oak throws its smallest branches to the brackish.

Where are you, Meredith? Sagebrush shards
tumble down the Front Range.

Do you know how to winterize a body?
I see no steeples to point me towards burial spots.

These basement walls quake into cobblestones.